Zeb Larson reviews Men of Wrath #1…
Ever since Great Grandfather Isom killed a man over some sheep, a black cloud has hung over the Rath family. Now, over a century later, Ira Rath, the coldest hitman ever to walk on Alabama soil, has taken a job that will decide the fate of his cursed family once and for all. Writer Jason Aaron (Southern Bastards, Scalped) and artist Ron Garney (Weapon X, Thor: God of Thunder) team up once again, to bring you the story of a Southern family, whose only heirloom is violence.
If you were paying too much attention to Southern Bastards this week (an entirely understandable thing), you might have missed that Jason Aaron and Ron Garney have a new comic book out: Men of Wrath. If you’re a long-time fan like me, you’ll be happy to see the team that brought us “Get Mystique” in Wolverine reunited. Like Southern Bastards, Men of Wrath is a story about the Deep South and the ugly form of violence that seems endemic to that part of the country. First issues are almost too early to use in judging a series’ overall worth, as there’s too much characterization and writing that needs to happen. This series to be fully fleshed out before it can be called a classic. That being said, Men of Wrath is an attention-grabbing opening issue that grabs you right by the gonads and doesn’t let go. Attention
Deep in Choctaw County, Alabama, the Rath family is well-known for a history of violence, dating back to Isom Rath’s stabbing of a neighbor in 1903. In the present, his descendant Ira is a hard and brutal man with a well-known reputation for violence. Rath appears to have no hobbies, friends, or life outside of a frighteningly large gun collection and a lot of dead bodies. After receiving a cancer diagnosis, he’s offered a job to “take care of somebody” who he knows very well. Whether this will set him on the path to redemption or will destroy him remains to be seen.
Right off the bat, the violence in this issue is pretty intense. Aaron and Garney aren’t pulling any punches with this, and the violence that’s here shows that Ira is a very, very bad man. There’s no hero or antihero in this story: Ira is a flat-out villain, one who seems to engage in violence almost mechanically. This will probably be a deal-breaker for some readers who don’t want to read a story that is so unremittingly bleak. But if you want to delve into something really dark, this will feel like a very natural read. The fact that Aaron drew the background from the history of his own family in Alabama makes it feel that much more real.
Garney’s art works really well for this issue, being less stylized and more realistic. Something about Ira looks just enough like Wolverine to evoke that character’s violent and grim nature, but also weathered by old age and the certainty of impending death. We only see Ira’s a couple of times in this comic, and never when he’s looking at anybody else. All that he presents to us as is an impenetrable and unreadable brute, one who might explode into violence at any time. His expressions never change, but his perpetual grimace suggests an attitude of indifferent hostility, a man who might kill you as soon as look at you.
For a comic that’s so violent, this book also asks a very relevant question: what do we do as we get older and closer to death? Ira is asking that question of himself, saying that nobody in his family ever lived this long and he doesn’t know what to do, apart from blow his brains out preemptively. How do we judge our legacy? And how do our families figure into that legacy? Rath is clearly contemplating his own family as he narrates this story, both past and present. It’s fitting that a series about a man who kills is also a series about how we get ready for death.
The stage is set for this series. Ira’s actions in the coming issues and the interactions with his family will make or break Men of Wrath, but it’s off to a very good start. I hope this snowball turns into an avalanche.
Zeb Larson
Originally published November 1, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
