Torpedo

Written by E. Sanchez Abuli
Illustrated by Jordi Bernet
4-Issues, B&W Comic Format
Hard Boiled Comics, 1993

Pretty much my favorite crime comic of all – based on the relative handful of stories I've been able to read – is E. Sanchez Abuli and Jordi Bernet's Torpedo. The long-running European comic chronicles the "adventures" of Depression-era New York hitman Luca Tortelli, alias "Torpedo," probably the nastiest piece of work to ever headline his own strip.

Utterly ruthless and amoral, Torpedo makes my own criminal comics protagonist, "Gravedigger" McCrae, look like a boy scout. In one of the twelve stories reprinted in this miniseries, "The Unrepentant," Torpedo shoots a priest in the back, in church, and then washes his face in holy water before smashing open the alms box to snag a twenty. In another, he wipes out a bunch of thugs who've been hassling a fishmonger, and then takes his payment by attempting to rape the seafood merchant's gorgeous wife. And in "My First Job," we learn how teenage immigrant Luca went from starving shoeshine boy to professional killer.

The guy's no role model, that's for sure.

Unfortunately, the English versions of the original, oversized graphic album collections are long out of print, hard to find, and expensive when you do, so I haven't got many. I do have these four Torpedo comic books that Fantagraphics put out in the early 90's (under their short-lived "Hard Boiled Comics" imprint), but they only whetted my appetite.

Each issue contains three 8-page Torpedo tales, translated by Gil Jordan. Without exception, they're genuinely hardboiled, uncompromising crime stories with some of the most beautiful comic book art I've ever seen. Both Alex Toth and Joe Kubert have sung Bernet's praises, and it's no wonder. His assured, flowing brushwork, skillful storytelling and authentic period detailing give the brutally violent, politically incorrect stories a sort of grotesque beauty that is a pleasure to behold.

I love this stuff, and hope someday that some American publisher has the balls to reprint more of the series. Torpedo is as good as the genre gets.

Six out of Six Bullets.