4 out of 5

I was so proud that Gerb’s Hard Time was the only book to make it out of DC’s odd ‘Focus’ sorta-imprint.  I was promoting the greatness of Steve heavily to comic friends at the time, and it was vindicating that a modern book came out that seemed to get more than just cult approval.  Of course, secretly, I didn’t think it was Steve’s best work – in fact, it felt sort of derivative – but I was proud nonetheless.  Returning to HT after that initial read, and after having gone through much more of Steve’s ouevre, it still does clearly belong to the latter portion of Steve’s career – which isn’t bad at all, just much more patient, and less reliant on Random – but it’s also a much more compelling read, especially as presented, uninterrupted, in the trade.  Now, if memory serves, the story does wander questionably hereafter, but we’ll see.  These first six (collected) issues are solid.

Ethan Harrow is, topically – and still, as of 2015, topically – part of a duo of masked gun-kids holding up a school cafeteria, threatening all the jocks who teased them with bullets.  But one such jock slings yet another insult toward the pair, and Ethan’s partner-in-crime loses it and begins shooting, which alarms Ethan, as the guns were supposed to be loaded with blanks and the threats were supposed to be a “joke” on the jocks.  Ethan interrupts the other shooter, Brandon – after he’s fired some rounds – and then the stress of the situation seems to overwhelm him and his eyes glow red and a giant force is unleashed.  This force blasts a hole through the heart of Brandon.

DC’s ‘Focus’ line, of which Hard Time was a part, promised “regular people” with super powers.  So that’s where that came from.  It’s also a throughline that allowed Steve to get distracted later, to my recollection, but again, we’ll get there.

Anyhow, although no one can explain how Brandon blew up, all of it – the attempted murders, Brandon’s death – are dumped on Ethan, and he’s made an example of and given 50 to Life in big boy jail.  The rest of the issues detail how Ethan’s intelligence, smart mouth, and youth butt up against other lifers, and gangs, and zealots, and Nazis.

Here’s what doesn’t work: It’s waaay too friendly.  The whole pitch – school shooting, kid in prison – is like a “this could happen to YOU” after-school special, and yet, for all of the overt grit in that one line description, there’s never much of a sense of… threat, or even reality.  The opening shooting feels both overblown and underwhelming, and Ethan in prison feels more like a kid is getting a tour of the Big House instead of being a resident.  Is it because it was DC?  It’s hard to say.  Steve’s one stab at more directly adult fare with Void Indigo owed more to odd fantasy than real life horror, so the jury’s out on whether or not he could truly write grim and dark.  Secondly: the color palette.  This was another Focus thing; all the books seemed to go for a main color theme – blue, pink, green – and a washed-out tone of it, I suppose to visually differentiate then from their four-color spandex-clad brethren.  It just ends up robbing Hurtt’s art of richness, though, and feels like another dab of the ol’ “THIS IS TOTES SERIOUS, Y’ALL” brush.

Here’s why that mostly doesn’t matter: Like Gerry Conway, Steve always had a particular skill when writing that, while maybe not ringing as exactly like how people talk or think in real life, that heightened the material.  It *flows*, and it sounds perfect within the settings Steve details.  For the majority of stuff he wrote, his style – his world – is apparent from page one, panel one, so instead of a bumpy ride where a writer tries to sound too hip or too genre, Steve just writes Steve.  He still gives us a range of character types, but it’s all under the umbrella of the Gerberverse.  Which is what I didn’t get about Hard Time on the first go: I *wanted* it to be darker, or weirder, instead of just letting it be Steve.  And when you do that, it’s a damned entertaining and intelligent book.  There are some questionable logic gaps that no one seems to question – to be filled in later in the story – but otherwise Ethan’s travails play around with a pretty fascinating topic that absolutely fits in with Steve’s themes: trapped in a world we never made.  Ethan’s life is immediately made hopeless.  We know he was part of the crime (whether or not he pulled the trigger on his gun), and so exoneration is not soon to come.  The super powered element may seem like an uneccessary layer, but it gives Steve a narrational excuse to step outside of Harrow’s point of view, and, because this power ends up taking the shape of a creature with a face, gives him yet another avenue for exploring innocence vs. the harshness of the world outside our heads.

To the trade, as Hard Time was presented sort of like a TV show, it was interestingly decided to not use chapter breaks and have all of the covers and “previously” sections at the end.  It’s a good choice.  The story reads very well when uninterrupted.