Merc #3, scripted by Peter David, with breakdowns by Alan Kupperberg and finished art by "Jack Fury", who seems to be "whoever's available to ink a few panels right now. "Many Hands" is one of his aliases.
Reflecting the presence of all those inkers, this issue really feels like a rush job. I get the impression even Kupperberg was asked to provide the breakdowns in less than a week-end.
A pity too, because the first issue in this
New Universe series, drawn by Gray Morrow, had looked pretty good. A bit simplistic in its approach and with too much gun porn for my taste, but that’s not something you can begrudge a comic titled “Merc”. However, #3 is a big, big step down quality-wise... Not a good thing for the dawn of what was supposed to be a new major line of comics from Marvel.
Credit where credit’s due: Kupperberg manages to tell the story in clear fashion, and he didn’t cut corner for this establishing shot of Philadelphia :
No idea if it was traced from a postcard or anything, but it was obviously
drawn at some point. It’s not a photocopy of a photocopy of a postcard, even if that’s a pretty clever and quick trick. But then perhaps the breakdowns
did have a postcard in that spot and that the inker did the rest! Who knows.
Some images look fine, but others have problems that even a beginner should be able to avoid. For example, how can this walkie-talkie stay in place? Unless MarK Hazzard is doubling as
Le Bateleur (the magician) in a deck of tarot cards, he should have a firmer grip on his device.
As for the suitcase in the image below, it looks as if it’s going through an intangible wall. The base of the wall should have been drawn further to the right, something that takes all of five seconds to do.
The several inkers working in parallel help correct some of Kupperberg’s usual problems (you may tell I'm not a fan), but they give the book a very unequal feel. Individual characters go from scrawny-looking to the incredible Hulk from one panel to the next, or their hairline go up and down. You sometimes have to refer to the text to make sure that the dude in the green suit is the same on page 7 and on page 8.
As for the story, well… It had some potential, but fails to realize it. Mark Hazzard, the titular hero, is a mercenary with an attitude. (How original. Ah, the ‘80s). We start by establishing his sort-of conflictual relationship with tough-talking police lieutenant Claire NoLastNameGiven. The title is still new, and Peter David is establishing who the main character and his supporting cast are, and so we learn that Hazzard tends to kill people in New York albeit never in ways that would have landed him in jail yet. Still, Claire sounds fed up with Hazzard’s careless trouble-mongering.
Our hero is then contacted by an Israeli secret service person named Ram, an old work acquaintance of Hazzard’s. He wants to hire Mark as head bodyguard to protect an unpopular Israeli politician, Eli Wisenthal who’ll soon take part in a big ticker-tape parade celebrating “Israel Day”. I wasn’t aware that was a thing in Philadelphia, but what do I know.
Hazzard isn’t interested until he learns that under his command will be an old West Point rival of his, Colonel Wolfson; he wouldn’t pass a chance to rub Wolfson’s nose in having to serve under Hazzard.
As any comic-book reader expects, the parade is attacked by “terrorists” who are such old hands at their work that they are heard saying things like “make sure this thing is loaded” before firing a bazooka. They fire three times and then attack with machine guns; for all we can tell, Hazzard is the only guy present who can shoot back. (Where are the cops? Aren’t there always lots of city cops at parades?)
The terrorists snatch wisenthal, and Wolfson prevents Hazzard from gunning them down before they escape on a motorcycle. The two men come to blows and finally the cops show up (there they were!)…
...to put Hazzard behind bars just of Wolfson’s say-so. I wasn’t aware that you could order city cops around like that, even when you’re military liaison to the Israeli embassy.
As Hazzard cools his heels in a jail cell, Wolfson gloats a little while our hero ponders his failure as a bodyguard. Thankfully Ram shows up (posing as Hazzard’s lawyer) and after punching al the cops present in an interrogation room the duo simply walks out. I’m fairly sure that it’s impossible for a guy under arrest and his fake lawyer to punch up cops in a police station and walk away without anyone noticing, but again what do I know.
Ram then explains that the terrorists are keeping Wisenthal hostage and demand the liberation of certain Palestinian prisoners. Hazzard then guesses what this is all about: Ram knew that Palestinians were going to stage such an abduction, and hired an American as head of security so that he could be the fall guy if things went south. As for Wisenthal, the poor guy is unpopular in Israel and his eventual loss wouldn’t be so bad. Naturally, to emphasize how evil and stupid the terrosists are, the reason Wisenthal is unpopular back home is that he’s sensible to the Palestinians’ problems. Stupid terrorists, biting the hand that feeds them!
Hazzard has to save his charge, of course, and uses a wrecking ball to enter the decrepit building the Palestinians are hiding in. Then comes a lesson in storytelling : a wrecking ball that approaches a villain’s head and is something like six inches away from it cannot be twelve feet away in the next image. Furthermore, on the third panel seen below, it’s clear that the ball is going to hit somewhere to the right of the bad guy’s position, and not right in his face. Oh, well.
Hazzard hopes in petto that the kevlar vest he wears under his shirt will protect him from going through a wall, leaving us to wonder just how thin a kevlar vest can be; I thought those things were pretty bulky. 'Cause it sure doesn't look like he's wearing anything under that shirt.
The thin, unseen but but very efficient vest protects our one-man company as he kicks a door in and starts shooting the bad guys while avoiding hitting Wisenthal, just as in the movie
Top Secret. Note that he clearly hits two men straight in the chest and one in the gut. In a second image, we see him shooting them in the legs too.
Note the akward position of Hazzard in the left panel above; that’s not a guy running down a flight of stairs; that’s a guy standing on the first step and kicking backward as high as he can.
Wisenthal says that Hazzard only shot the bad guys in the legs, suggesting that he wasn’t paying attention to the above panel; but leaving these dudes alive is important for the story’s ending.
Now were that story mine to conclude, I would establish that Hazzard was indeed hired as a fall guy but that the whole deal was actually an assassination attempt on Wisenthal, an attempt disguised as a terrorist attack. Hazzard was expected to fail (justifying the very bad security during the parade), the unpopular and perhaps politically embarrassing Wisenthal was supposed to die, and the dumb American would take the blame. But no, David decides to play it absolutely straight. The bad guys were really Palestinians, and now that they have been captured alive our Reagan-era heroes can torture them because "no more Mr. Nice Guy". First, Ram leaves with the prisoners, overruling the local police who want to detain them. (Conspiracy theorists would have a ball with the concept of an Israeli secret service guy giving orders to American cops on American soil!) Ram then taunts them a little and has them eaten alive by big dogs, unpure animals, in order to cause them spiritual anguish on top of physical pain. But before we could think that Ram is a sick m****r, he is given a pre-emptive get out of jail free card: his family was murdered in a terrorist bombing, so he’s justified in being revengeful.
Or is he? Come on, even if we forget all about due process, how could Ram know that these dudes are the ones who caused his bereavement? He doesn't say he recognizes them, and they didn’t indiscriminately hurt innocent people. They attacked Wisenthal’s car, yes, but aimed their violence at “legitimate” targets. And then they didn’t send a few of their hostage’s fingers as an incentive to negotiate faster, but treated him fairly well.
As for motivations for violence, I’m sure that those guys could claim that members of the IDF killed members of their family too, justifying their own anger. Had the two different agendas been put in parallel, we might have had an interesting story about escalation in hatred and man’s inhumanity to man, but it’s all treated as a simple good guy vs bad guy scenario: Israeli killer good, Palestinian killer bad.
What doesn’t help story-wise is that as Ram murders his prisoners, panels are interspersed with close-ups of Hazzard who says things like “this is intolerable” or “I’m not going to let this continue”, but it’s revealed that he’s actually commenting the movie Rambo II and criticizing its unrealistic action scenes. I don't think such a light-hearted tone was warranted at all at that point, unless the goial is really to present Hazzard as a nihilistic monster (which i somehow doubt was the idea).
I wouldn’t read another issue of Merc until the final one, and I think I understand why. This was hardly on par with what other then-current titles had to offer.
Thought it was a great story that was disjointed at first but really came together at the end. Loved the part where Jay, Barry, and Wally merge together to take out Grodd
