by Craig McDonald and Kevin Singles with Les McClaine
Adapted from a novel by Craig McDonald.
Published by First Second in 2017.
. . .
"It's a bitch to outlive your world."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
So . . . you have books. Novels. Fiction. They get written. They get published. Some get made into movies: American Psycho, Jurassic Park, The Hunger Games, Dr. No, The Lord of the Rings, Fifty Shades of Grey, Perdita Durango, Wild at Heart, Black Rain, Les Miserables, Dracula, The Color Purple, Frankenstein . . .
Non-fiction books also get made into movies: All the President's Men, Lincoln, Oppenheimer, 12 Years A Slave, Heaven and Earth, The Big Short, Moneyball, Charlie Wilson's War, Fast Food Nation, Thirteen Days, Born on the Fourth of July . . .
Books can also be adapted into comic books (a.k.a. graphic novels). Plenty of literary classics have been turned into comics and/or manga: various plays by Shakespeare, various stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Kafka's The Trial, 1984, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Octavia E. Butler's Kindred, The War of the Worlds, The Martian Chronicles, The Handmaid's Tale, No Longer Human, The Prophet, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Tale of Genji, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Dracula, City of Glass, Perdita Durango, Fahrenheit 451, those Richard Stark books, Frankenstein . . .
Usually, as far as my experience goes, these adaptations don't typically involve the original authors. If the work being adapted is quite old, it's usually because the original author is long dead. Living authors are usually busy writing their next book, so it isn't practical to take the time to write a whole new script for a movie or a comic book iteration of the prose fiction original. It also seems to be a common sentiment that writing prose is usually a separate skillset from screenwriting or comics scripting therefore you need people specialized to the task, though this is far from a settled matter. I sometimes think that comic book adaptations of novels are a bit risk averse due to a fear of displeasing the source material's fanbase. I mean if you read a comic book version of 1984 that ended with Ewoks liberating Winston and blowing up Big Brother you'd probably take to the streets in protest. So these "graphic novel" takes on literature tend to closely replicate the prose originals for better and for worse.
But I found a comic book adaptation of a novel written by the original author in one of those dollar discount stores back in 2019. Those places sometimes have interesting selections of books, usually remaindered copies of popular bestsellers, but for awhile it felt like you could locate super cheap copies of intriguing nonfiction stuff, like critiques of U.S. militarism, history, memoirs-hardback copies of books that are usually futilely priced around $30 brand new, but look a whole lot sexier for $1 (now it would be $1.25).
And, yes, the occasional comic book.
Including Head Games, a "graphic novel" adaptation of a book adapted by the original writer in collaboration with a couple of artists.
But, uh, I didn't buy Head Games because it was adapted by the original author. I bought it because it was a cheap comic book, and I can't resist a cheap comic. Especially when it's 160 pages for $1 plus applicable sales tax-whoa baby! At a price that low, I'm guaranteed to enjoy it even if it sucks. I had no idea what it was about. I did not recognize the names on the cover. I wasn't even sure if I liked the front and back cover art. I assumed it was some kind of a horror tale due to the skull on the front cover. The back cover depicted a trio of what I took to be vampire hunters: a lady with a cross around her neck and two dudes with guns. Nothing amazing, but sometimes comics don't have to be amazing so long as they tell an engaging story. I don't remember, but I'm sure I peeked inside the actual book . . . but maybe I didn't. More and more I suspect this was a pure impulse buy.
So, I bought Head Games for a buck+applicable sales tax back in 2019 . . .and I think I was gonna read it . . . but time passed, and it was an impulse buy, and I had other things to read . . . and then at some point during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic I had it in a stack of comics I intended to read in lieu of raising hell out on the town: a collection of the Doug Moench/Herb Trimpe Godzilla comics, Miller and Mazzuchelli's Born Again, a black and white collection of Jack Kirby's New Gods, Fun Home, one of those Lynd Ward woodcut novels, and a couple of volumes of Love and Rockets-and Head Games was basically top of the stack. But it kept getting demoted. Of course I re-read the Moench/Trimpe Godzilla collection first. That's just who and what I am. And then the Kirby book. Aaaaand . . . my memory's a little fuzzy as to what came next. I think I got caught up playing Shin Megami Tensei IV, but, well, a lot of the pandemic felt like one deluxe sized day. And I'm not sure it's actually over. Politically, sure, we in the USofA collectively gave up, like, I dunno . . . Day One? Day Two? What's the COVID-19 body count up to now . . . ? Say, why am I giving a fuck? Presidents, Governors, and regular folk all stopped caring, right? Sure.
But back to Head Games . . . basically I read, like, all of the other comics I had accumulated . . . and then I still wasn't ready to take a chance on it. I still had some Kirby shit I wanted to read and re-read. The library hooked me up with three fat volumes of black and white reprints of 1960s Avengers. Those Marvel movies put me to sleep, but I get super activated by the primal comics. I was writing some silly shit about video games, so I was messing around with video games. There was always something else. Usually something comfortable, something familiar, and I'm a big re-reader, so . . . Head Games just didn't scan for me. I hate to be such a brand loyal consumerist slob, but I was totally freezing out the new guys, so to speak.
And then, a couple of weeks ago . . . I noticed a book that was unfamiliar to me. Head Games. I didn't remember buying it, not at first. Was it something gifted to me? Did I steal it? Did someone leave it here by mistake? I picked it up, opened it, started reading it . . . and I was like, Oh, I bought this back before the Deluxe Day of Pandemic . . . as I read I realized it was an adaptation of the first book in a series of historical hard-boiled crime thrillers about a tough guy who writes tough guy stories who gets threaded into the 20th Century histories of Mexico and the United States. So, you have a fictional lead character rubbing shoulders with Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Ernest Hemingway, Prescott Bush, Pancho Villa-it's kinda like Forrest Gump by way of James Ellroy.
The art style is in-the-moment with occasional flashbacks, anchored to real world locations, lots of shootouts and guilt-ridden interludes of self-reflection all in black, white, and piss gold. It's gold because it's about the pulp protagonist facing the end of his personal Golden Age . . . and it's piss because he's a drunk in a world of liars and killers and thieves. The action centers around various unsavory characters fighting to obtain the skull of Pancho Villa, including gangs of cannon fodder frat boys dispatched from the sinister Skull and Bones Society based out of Yale University. Head Games isn't quite a conspiracy theory book, but it does take a cynically hilarious view of the pampered and the privileged.
In short, I put off reading the impulsively purchased Head Games throughout most of that Deluxe Day of Pandemic because it was an unknown quantity . . . and then I rediscovered it amongst my shit, and read it on an impulsive whim in a single sitting. And it was great.
Head Games has an incredibly effective structure. I don't want to give too much away beyond that, but it does a very good job of putting across the dilemma of its main character who is a 57 year old two-fisted pulp hero whose body is still barely up for a fight but is also just starting to fail him as his alcoholism and long-untreated diabetes begin to degrade his eyesight and his mobility. Truly, he's a hero of both piss and gold. And it is my opinion that Head Game's clever story structure is the result of the direct involvement of the original writer, a newcomer to the field of comics writing who was just protective enough of his book that he was able to nudge the project into unpredictable territory, but not so stubborn as to be closed off to the uniquely expressive qualities of comics. If I have a criticism, I do think the very last page is a bit of a letdown, most likely due to it being a blatant setup for a sequel, but that's a problem with many forms of serialized storytelling. Endings are tough.
Head Games . . . I had to play a game with my own head to finally read it.
What a world!
