Brand Echh: DOGS OF WAR #1

The last two series launched by Jim Shooter’s new company DEFIANT were both direct spin-off of the firm’s inaugural title WARRIORS OF PLASM. Which seems to me like a strange choice. At this point, was there any indication that WARRIORS OF PLASM was so popular that it could support multiple projects/ In any event, Shooter was clearly all-in on the concepts that he’d conceived for that series, and so while he wouldn’t be directly writing either of the spin-out books regularly, he was still clearly invested in them. DOGS OF WAR was the first of these.

DOGS OF WAR starred Elvis Mazerov, codenamed Shooter–Shooter had created the character when he realized that he should be proactive rather than leave a possibility that some other company might put forth a character using his own last name. Given the times, and the enmity with which Marvel in particular seemed to view Shooter’s new venture, this wasn’t a possibility out of the question. Having been bioengineered into a much more powerful form and granted the power to become invisible in the pages of WARRIORS OF PLASM, this issue brings the character back to Earth and sets him up on a series of side adventures, accompanied irregularly by another of the Warriors of Plasm, the one-armed Mouse. Shooter had been a soldier prior to having his biology rewritten and this was an era in which tough guy military heroes were all the rage, so there was some sense in shooter attempting to set the character up as a solo player. And of course, Jim didn’t want to publish a comic book with the title SHOOTER–the blowback would be extreme.

While Jim was involved with conceptualizing the series, the actual writing on this issue fell to Art Holcomb, a writer who worked around the edges of the industry for much of the 1990s but who never broke through in a big way. Holcomb wound up writing all five published issues of the series, though Shooter often contributed co-plotting assistance. The artwork was produced by Georges Jeanty, As far as I can tell, it was Georges’ first mainstream series, and he too stayed with the book for the entirety of its truncated five-issue run. It’s another DEFIANT comic that reads perfectly fine, if a little bit on the dull side, and in which the bizarre full color coloring approach fights the artwork at every turn. It’s trying to do something visually superior but just hasn’t quite figured out how to make the best use of all of its assets yet.

As for the story, it opens with Shooter returning to Earth from Plasm after the immediate conflict there has been settled. He’s been gone for several months, though, and when he attempt to report in to the military about his newfound powers, they think he’s a crackpot reservist and toss him off-base. What’s more, in the interim his apartment has been rented out to somebody else, and his girlfriend has moved on to a new suitor. With nowhere else to go, Elvis calls his mother in Bayonne, New Jersey. But rather than being happy to hear from him, Shooter’s mom is stand-offish, which compels him to head over to her place anyway in an attempt to work out what’s wrong.

When Elvis arrives, finding his mom’s home in disarray and a stack of unpaid bills, she tells him that she got scammed out of all her money investing in Iridium through a shady consortium. Pissed off, Shooter heads out to the headquarters of International Iridium and trashes the place, but is unable to get his mother’s money back. Shae-facedly, he turns to Mouse, who agrees to loan him the funds to get his mother back on her feet. In the aftermath, Shooter is accosted by a drug pusher in the park and he winds up taking the guy’s weapon and bankroll from him, kicking him out of the park. Sensing an opportunity, he begins to repeat these efforts, effectively robbing from criminals in order to make a living.

At this point, Elvis is approached by one of the officers from his old base, who wants his help in finding his missing daughter. The soldier has done enough research to where he’s discovered that the car his daughter was getting into belonged to a guy who works for a company that makes child pornography film. For unexplained reasons, the Soldier can’t get the police to take his claims seriously, so instead he’s willing to put this matter into the hands of a seeming crackpot due to the fact that he saw him become invisible once. Shooter tracks down the man in a remote shack, beats the hell out of everybody there and begins to work his way back up the string to their employers. Figuring that he could use backup in taking down the ringleaders, he turns once more to Mouse for assistance.

Shooter and Mouse kick their way into the compound of the head of the operation, a wealthy unnamed woman. She’s unimpressed by Shooter’s bravado and physical power, telling him that she’s got cops and federal agents and political figures in high places all on her payroll and that she can bring him down easily if he chooses to make an issue of matters. The soldier’s daughter is long gone, sold off to some other porn outfit. Shooter and Mouse move to leave, then Shooter excuses himself to double back and do…something to the woman. There’s a really dark implication of just what that something might be, though it’s all vague enough that the creators could easily backpedal away from it if they chose to. Still, it’s a truly dark and unsettling note to go out on, and one that made me immediately not want to read the series any further. The whole issue is oddly discordant–it’s clearly trying to be a Punisher-like hard-boiled action hero riff, but the tone isn’t consistent and the attempts to be edgy, like the close, all feel somehow a bit off, like those involved don’t entirely understand what makes the genre work.