4 out of 5

This is hilariously, geniusly, subversive, taking a quirky blockbuster setup and then dashing it to complete bits over the course of its three issues.  I know and trust writer Fabien Vehlmann, but still, reading the first issue I was wondering how in the heck this thing would get wrapped up so quickly.  I assumed this was published as one European-sized HC volume in its original French, and those normally come out as a series, so I worred – did this not sell well, meaning we never got the followup issues?  Would I never see 7 Psychopaths completed?

But fear not: it is a complete tale, and it’s a delightfully wild one; a very odd, but admirable, choice for Vehlmann’s first comic to appear on an American imprint as a monthly floppy, precisely for the subversion I mention above, because how do you sell this?

Well, probably by billing it as what it suggests: it’s 1941, and a kooky professor says he can solve the war by killing Hitler.  ‘Duh,’ says the UK Special Operations Executive, ‘like we haven’t tried – and failed – at that before.’  But kooky professor has a kooky take on that: they’ve failed because they knew it was a fool’s errand.  By employing seven people who are too insane to realize that they’ll fail – seven psychopaths, say – then loopy-loo logic suggests they’ll actually succeed.  Why seven?  …Reasons?

This premise is the stuff of action movies, though; your Suicide Squad band-o’-renegades up against impossible odds.  And since we have a mentalist on the team, and a mimic who can make ace-perfect disguises with just a bit of shoe polish, and other twists on the sharpshooter type, and the muscle, and etc., Vehlmann scoots things just enough outside of ‘reality’ to hint that we might be getting an Inglorious Basterds alt-history jig.  So maybe they will succeed?

And most things in this genre, excepting some particular last minute twists, would follow a similar buildup path: a training montage; the group bickering before coming to an uneasy alliance; generally a late betrayal; emerge as heroes.  What’s fantastic about 7 Psychopaths is not only that it doesn’t follow this – at all – but that it goes so willfully far field so quickly that your question as to how Fabien was planning to wrap this up in three issues is completely forgotten behind a blustery, half-laughing sense of wonder: what in the Hell is going on?

Artist Sean Phillips comments at the end of the last issue that working on a European format comic was a dream, but that it was also demanding: the tight pace and many panels were not his usual page layout.  He does a phenomenal job, capturing, as he often does, personalities and a sense of motion perfectly, but I also think the cramped quarters limited some of the pantomime that ends up making a lot of American comics look pretty similar after a while.  Hubert’s colors are war-time murky but touched with a lot of gradients, and Deron Bennett’s letters match Phillips scrappy style well.

I’ve knocked a star off here because, admittedly, the thing might be a bit too compressed: it’s a lot of characters to match to names, and several time I had to glance back to tie who we were talking about to a face.  The limited pages also means some character “arcs” necessarily conclude off panel, which is rather disappointing as we got face time with them for introductions.  The concession with that, though, is that nothing feels unconsidered: even up to the last page where I was about to ask “…what about…?” my question was answered.

Great fun.