5 out of 5

Hm.  I slept on Buzzkill because the idea of a superhero who’s only super when he’s drunk seemed a little too, well… THIS IS A COOL IDEA SO THE BOOK IS COOL to me, and I rag plenty on series for pitching the gist over content, so that was that.  I flipped through it on the racks, but holy judgment (i.e. mine) had already been passed down.

I’m not sure what caused me to then give The Paybacks a “second chance,” so to speak, except that that same holy judgment allows me the humility to see the potential flaws in my past decisions and rewrite history accordingly, so Buzzkill and Ghost Fleet have now been purchased and I was always a Cates and Rahal fan.  But for real, I suppose that Paybacks had the same possible perceived problem, with its “cool” concept of a team that goes around collecting loans from heroes and villains – conscripting those who can’t pay their loans into the team, like a Suicide Squad of Repo-men – but I think the challenge of writing a team book gave me pause: this wouldn’t be an easy “joke” to extend unless the creatives went for lazy parody (e.g. Superman… broke!  Batman… rents his car!), and this time, my flip-through suggested that wasn’t the case.

Which, really, is the main proof of how creative Donny and Eliot are.  Chris Roberson did something similar with Edison Rex – the characters we recognize are certainly templates for the characters in the PBs world, but the template is wholly filled with unique values.  Thus “Bloodpouch,” part of the Paybacks, can make us chuckle with his 90s pouch-covered outfit inspiration (including the hilarious pouch-as-eyepatch), but the lazy gag would then be to write him as a 90s character (all angst and swears), and instead, he – Harold – is written to make sense as part of the team and the series.  Extend the same courtesy to all of the proxies, and even to the series itself, which opens with a gag cover of repossessing Night Knight’s (i.e. Batman) car, the story therein even suggesting that heroes and villains might be big kids just playing dress-up, but NK, once roped into the team, is his own man, and a valid hero (within the context of the Paybacks’ function, anyway) to boot.  That by the first issue I knew all of the character’s names and enjoyed spending time with them shows just how well Cates and Rahal pull this off.  And note that the final two issues of the series’ covers can highlight only our team and not a direct superhero joke.

Also well effected is the amount of stuff that exists in four issues – teams and teams of Paybacks; a magic doctor; a magic van; a mysterious benefactor (Mr. Pierce); a mission-per-issue setup; a conspiracy – and that it ne’er overwhelms.  I just criticized another series I read, Diesel, for trying to do too much in four issues, but that note and the appreciation of packed content here are not at odds: Diesel wanted you to see every event as a major one; Paybacks has a purposefully cavalier attitude that makes all the madness easy to follow, and makes the series’ eventual turn toward more serious fare that much more effective.

Oh, did I mention that?  That it turns out it’s not just a fun idea but it’s an actual story?  And that this story is woven into the repossession schemes so it doesn’t feel like we’ve had a story bait-and-switch done?

Yeah, this is grand stuff.  And none of this has mentioned Geoff Shw’s art, which is a whole series of “dinner table” setups that never once slips in its ace sense of pacing or framing, or Lauren Affe’s colors, which sincerely have this nice 80s sense to them – not the color scheme itself, but the, hm, just the intensities and choices feel more in line with an 80s Epic title than the kind of stuff you see today – or Michael Heisler’s letters, which stuff (as I flip through the book to review) quite a lot of words on each page but I never noticed…

Thankfully, The Paybacks are returning.  It’s not at Dark Horse, apparently, so I hope the content doesn’t change in style, but either way, at this moment, Cates and Rahal have a new fanboy.  (I mean, fan who’s been there from the start, duh.)