Turf #5 - Mobile Edition

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Turf #5
By Dan Horn
June 4, 2011 - 11:20

Image Comics
Writer(s): Jonathan Ross
Penciller(s): Tommy Lee Edwards
Inker(s): Tommy Lee Edwards
Colourist(s): Tommy Lee Edwards
Letterer(s): John Workman
Cover Artist(s): Tommy Lee Edwards with variants by Dave Gibbons and Michael Kaluta
$2.99 US

Turf, the genre-bending Depression-era epic pitting gangsters, a headstrong female reporter, and an outer-space immigrant against a clan of ravenous vampires, concludes this week. Hard-nosed bootlegger Eddie Falco has gone through a lot of changes recently: from criminal to Good Samaritan, from human to something else entirely, and now from lowlife to savior. He and his alien friend, Squeed, have finally mustered enough people and firepower to take on the blood-sucking Dragonmir clan, but the wheels to the vampires' sanguinary ritual to raise their Man Killer god have already begun turning. Meanwhile, newspaper journalist Susie and her lover, the exiled vampire Grigori, join the savage fray, though it may already be lost. This issue dishes out the blood and gore like nobody's business. It's a sufficiently rewarding conclusion punctuated with a .38 slug (and an ominous cliffhanger that alludes to more pop-culture genus-mixing in the future).

It's difficult to believe that I reviewed the first issue of this series nearly fourteen months ago. The closing chapter of this five-issue title has been a long time coming, but it's never felt irritating, as many other delayed titles tend to, and I think that's a testament to Jonathan Ross's capacious scripting and Tommy Lee Edwards' flawless artwork. Every issue had given me enough to read and enough to pore over to satiate my tastes for gangsters, vampires, and aliens until the next book was released. Turf embodies a unique idea, however familiar the end result became, and has all the trappings of a wickedly entertaining summer movie blockbuster.

Even with all the genre-mashing, though, Turf is pretty simple and straightforward, almost to a fault. Though the story is at times well-textured, there isn't much periphery or dimensionality to characters or events other than what the reader is spoon-fed by Ross's narrative. I would have liked to have seen some abstract strangeness be the glue that held the three genres together, but instead Turf relies on a fairly light premise, substituting the mere novelty that the story hosts so many seemingly counter-intuitive boilerplates for actual substance. A slew of rudimentary allegories of race, religion, and redemption can barely mask Turf's shortcomings.

However, those drawbacks can be masked by Ross's enthusiastic delivery and by Edwards' lavishly gritty art deco presentation. Turf may not have been the perfection I had hoped for, but, in the words of Ross himself, "I'd say it has potential."

Rating: 7.5/10