Point Blank. This item is unavailable.Point Blank

POINT BLANK is the gritty prequel to the critically acclaimed SLEEPER graphic novel series written by Eisner Award-winner Ed Brubaker (Criminal, Captain America) and stylishly rendered by legendary artist Colin Wilson.

Ex-Black Ops soldier Cole Cash is caught in a whirlpool of secrets, lies, manipulation, and murder. But before he goes down for the last time, he's going to get some answers. No matter whom he has to kill along the way.

As Cole investigates a brutal attempt that has left his one-time commander and legendary spy-master, John Lynch, at the brink of death, he maneuvers through the labyrinthian byways of intrigue that are the favored routes of men like Lynch. But to find the answers he seeks, Cash will have to discover the key to one of his old Team 7 comrade's greatest achievements - and his greatest shame. But can he bring this dirty little secret in to the light of day? And what other secrets of his own will he discover along the way?

Brubaker has a feel for writing about the urban underworld (documented in his graphic novel A Complete Lowlife), and here he puts a small-time superhero, Cole Cash (aka the Grifter), in the starring role of what's effectively a hardboiled detective story, using some clever narrative tricks. Brubaker notes that Alan Moore's Watchmen and the film The Limey inspired the fragmented chronology and retrospective revelations of his story, but an even better reference point is the movie Memento. The tricks memory plays are central to this work (which has spun off into Brubaker's current series, Sleeper), and flipping back to earlier sequences when they're mentioned again almost always reveals something the reader was led to get wrong. Detective stories dovetail with the seedy underbelly of the capes-and-cowls world, and what looks like a murder can turn into something else altogether. (And if readers have ever wondered what kind of bars supervillains congregate in, this book has the answer.) Cash is an ultraviolent alcoholic loser, and the deeper he gets into the nasty secrets of his own past, the less his habit of shooting his way out does any good. By book's end, he doesn't see how it all fits together, but readers will. Wilson's artwork is unspectacular but serviceable, and suitably ugly-everything seems to be covered with grime.
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Dean of comics scripters Alan Moore masterminded the universe of this stylish neonoir exercise. It is essentially that of Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (1987), which reinvented the costumed crime-fighter genre. In it "masks" (costumed crusaders) are just some of the new breed of posthumans. There are also plenty of posthuman intelligence spooks like Lynch. A no-show for a supposedly important meeting with former lieutenant Cole Cash, Lynch turns up shot in the head but still ticking. Taken to an ER, Lynch is out of it, but his damaged brain starts fixing itself. Meanwhile, Cole undertakes a corpse-strewn odyssey to find out who shot Lynch and why, only to wind up back where he started. Besides Moore, Brubaker acknowledges Lee Marvin in the book's dedication--he'd better, since he owes this book's title and manner of development to one of Marvin's best vehicles, John Boorman's Point Blank (1967). Artist Wilson makes Cole more handsome than Marvin but Cole's milieu as hard-edged and moodily lit as the movie's. Gratifyingly violent and ambiguous. Ray Olson
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