Home Columns Classic Comic Compendium Classic Comic Compendium: AMERICAN CARNAGE was Vertigo’s last great crime book

Classic Comic Compendium: AMERICAN CARNAGE was Vertigo’s last great crime book

Noir does not get better than this.

04/14/2025 11:00 am

While horror and weird heroes may have been what early Vertigo was initially known for and grew out of from mainline DC, you could also argue that crime and mystery was also baked into the DNA. Starting with Sandman Mystery Theatre, but later being cemented with such perennial classics like 100 Bullets and Scalped. Even Hellblazer at times could be considered dabbling in noir and there was the short-lived, but almost universally excellent, black and white hardcover Vertigo Crime sub-imprint.

It makes sense to me that one of the last wave would be a crime book.

“I just wanted to belong somewhere. All my life I’ve been told I was shit. That’s all they say and I’m not. I don’t have anywhere.”

American Carnage by Bryan Hill, Leandro Fernandez, Dean White, and Pat Brosseau is the tale of Richard Wright, a former FBI agent dealing with the guilt of a bad shoot, brought back for an off-book undercover case to infiltrate a group of white nationalists. Trying to uncover who murder another agent’s partner and wading through a mire of racism, greed, and ambition. It’s deeply unpleasant.

I can’t even really say that there are shades of grey to this story. Though you can argue that the lead is at least trying to be a good person, the world presented here is one filled with lies, deception, and hatred. There’s a kind of moral relativism wherein the characters try to justify their hatred, their denigration of others, that mixes both racism and classism, that’s just reprehensible. But true in the sense that people do this all the time. They never think of their behaviour as untoward and likely believe themselves to be the “good guys”. And that some will adhere to an ideology simply out of a sense of belonging. Going along to get along.

Leandro Fernandez has a style reminiscent of Eduardo Risso and Marcelo Frusin. Fine lined, exaggerated characters defined by copious amounts of shadow. It works incredibly well for crime and horror stories, bringing a rich darkness to the visuals. Fernandez’s sense of layouts and pacing are also impeccable, especially when it comes to depictions of violence and the despair on some of the characters’ faces. It’s enhanced by Dean White’s colours, which occasionally give a kind of watercolour effect, and a bit of a feeling of murkiness to the story’s atmosphere.

Pat Brosseau also does something interesting here with some of the word balloons, leaving some of them open to the gutter. The effect visually leaves the dialogue open a bit more, compared to all of the shadows on the page.

“Secrets are hard to keep, Richard. They eat away at you.”

What’s funny is that, of all of the final wave before Vertigo was shuttered, American Carnage by Hill, Fernandez, White, and Brosseau is one that got a conclusion. Not one that leaves things hanging, but a definitive end. I’m not sure if it’s the ending that was always intended, or if it came much sooner than what was hoped, but this one went nine issues as opposed to six, and pivoted to a finale. It’s a darkly unsatisfying end, though that’s also what makes it perfect. The final chapter is bleak and will leave you cold.

This book is a harsh look at uncomfortable subject matter. The characters are almost thoroughly unlikable. The language (I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that there are racial slurs in the work.) and violence are honed to knife point. And you’re not going to like the end. Noir doesn’t really get better than this.