Savage Town

BOOKLIST -- Image Comics'original graphic novel is dedicated to Steve Dillon, and, indeed, it captures anecho of the late British artist's collaborations with writer Garth Ennis onvarious crime sagas. Here working-class family man Jimmy Savage is navigatinghis way around the Hogans and the Dawsons, the two leading crime families ofLimerick, Ireland. Jimmy is small time but has big ideas and is bucking for thetop, and through various vicious schemes and betrayals, he appears to be on hisway. The story offers a blue-collar social realism that paints an authenticsense of place and a believable portrait of Jimmy and his crowd, whose dialoguecomes in a torrent of regional slang, which sometimes requires careful parsing.Jimmy, meanwhile, is by no means a sweetheart, as his bloody response to hisoldest friend's betrayal attests. The art, though, softens the lines of itsfigures and uses the thick-jawed faces and occasional black-dots-for-eyes stylereminiscent of old-time comic strips, effectively blunting the edges of the grimbrutality with a cushion of visual innocence.