I’m a huge fan of crime stories.
If the yarn’s a good one I don’t care if the medium is a novel, a comic book, a movie or television. Men of Wrath, the five issue crime comic mini-series by Jason Aaron and Ron Garney looks like it will be a good ‘un.
Men of Wrath follows a hitman named Ira Wrath and as Jason Aaron lays it out…
He’s a bad guy. He’s an older guy who’s reaching the end of his life, which consists pretty much of killing people for money and living alone in an empty house which doesn’t have much furniture. For him it’s clearly not about the money. There’s something else going on.
“Men of Wrath” is about a family history. So each issue opens with flashbacks to different generations of the Rath family. We kind of start to see how the cycle of violence begins and gets perpetuated and passed down from generation to generation of this family and kind of culminates in Ira as the worst of the bunch.
So it’s pretty clear from his opening scene, which kind of punches of you in the face and tells you that he is not a nice man. It’s a story of how this cycle of violence has led to this one sad and very scary man.
Dave Richards at CBR.com conducted an excellent interview with Jason Aaron and Ron Garney about Men of Wrath. One word of caution before you click over – Aaron warns us that Wrath is not a nice man and in the opening sequence does something that punches the reader in the face — I felt clobbered. This is not a comic for kids or some adults but if you like crime comics, you’ll probably look forward to the ride.
