3 crampons out of 5

Ah, if there were more series like The Middleman.  Probably some of them would be funnier, but still, I’d be spending more money on comics.

Middleman plays at being high-concept but it’s really just a normal adventure tale: girl finds out monsters are real, gets wrapped up in secret society that deals with wacky things like monsters.  But the story pays off by sticking to the Men in Black vein of understanding that it’s all a little silly.  Grillo-Marxuach, along these lines, packs the 3 collections of this series with references and jokes that are thankfully annotated in the back, and Les McClane’s pencils keep the art clear and zippy.  Each volume tackles a foe, hovering somewhere between inventive and tired retreads, similarly hovering between acting like these things are original and strange and recognizing that they’re retreads.

There is, frankly, a frustrating imbalance between too little story and too much story.  The tale jumps right in: Wendy is temping as a secretary at some science agency when things go awry and a big monster breaks out and starts killing scientists.  There’s some trickery to her getting fired from said science agency and then getting a temp job at a front that happens to be the recruiting grounds for Middlemen… over the course of the three volumes, Grillo-Marxuach attempts to build a loose larger story about the unknown background of The Middlemen, Wendy’s father, The Middleman’s last partner… but it’s very similar to that opening, where it’s a lot of big ideas sort of funneled through representations that seem only half thought out, and then filled in more fully with stock ideas.  Which makes it sound lazy, but I think it’s just Grillo-Marxuach’s TV training of story commodity, because it’s not lazy.  The fun stuff to the collected min-trades are the annotations in the back which point out all the references the team worked on sticking in to the series… they were in love with this book, and that love is what keeps you reading more than anything else.  It’s very energetic, it’s just not as big of a story idea as the britches they seemed to design.  On the television adaptation of this it works better because they’re forced into an episode-by-episode format.  What works better in the comic version are all of the visual puns and, naturally, the big budget ideas that can be drawn but not shown affordably.

Anyhow.  You’ll probably be on the cusp of laughing for most of The Middleman.  If the concept draws you in, try to not to put too much hope into it – it’s really just a springboard for some old-school puns and gags, and a license to play loose and easy with reality.  The jokes fall flat pretty often, which is where that ‘cusp’ comes from, but everything is presented very crisply and cleanly so you can just keep rolling with it, and you might find yourself enjoying it conceptually, which ends up being enough.  Writers that are more familiar with how to work in the comic medium (sorry, Javier) will probably get the balance of timing and banter and action better, but my initial statement still holds true: there’s a very pristine joy that the creators had working on this that absolutely comes across when reading, and if that was apparent in more books, I’d be a poor(er) man.