A Sickness in the Family- Denise Mina & Antonio Fuso

My friend Gordon Harries will be pinch-hitting here at BammPow on occasion, dropping reviews of various solid stuff. Happy to have him. Here's his take on one of the better releases from Vertigo's new-ish crime imprint.

A Sickness in The Family
Denise Mina/Antonio Fuso

Vertigo Crime

Family, so the argument goes, best operates as an enabling device: the family home as a safe haven where the natural abilities and virtues of a child can unfurl, before that child is exposed (via work, university or whatever) to the difficulties that real life can offer.

This isn’t a story about that family. It’s a story about the other family, where love (should it have existed) has long since curdled. Leaving the family at the heart of this narrative –The Ushers- less a support network than six people who share blood, secrets and a keen desire to eviscerate one another. Naturally, a McGuffin is required to expose the ushers to one another and that’s provided here by Ted Usher’s recent selling of the family business. Each member of the rest of the family –whether it be university dropout William, recent graduate Amy, adoptive child Sam, wife Biddy or grandmother Martha—find themselves with competing agendas for how the money is to be used. All are frustrated by Ted’s decision to buy an adjacent flat, enlarge the property and provide “an investment, for all of you, for later.”

Its right around then that people start to die.

Of course, such a set-up would be a cheap thing indeed if the characters’ were not invested with sufficient depth. Across five discreet chapters author Denise Mina–both via a clever framing device (wherein the reader finds out, several years hence, just what one of the more passive characters’ thought of the events unfolding before us.) and a series of compelling character studies—does just that. In Ted’s chapter, for example, we see his difficulties in tolerating his wife’s continuing infidelities, which offers sobering counter-point to the escalating violence within the family home.

It’s worth noting too, that in a genre where violence is too often utilized as a cartoon-ish prop, Mina’s brutality –both here and in her acclaimed prose work-- is often jarring. This is perfectly complemented by both artist Antonio Fuso (who with the aforementioned framing device illustrates that he can draw age beautifully, a rarity amongst comics artists) and the book’s greyscale moodiness.

Denise Mina and Antonio Fuso’s neo-gothic is, for my money, the best graphic novel that Vertigo Crime has yet published. It is dark, violent, funny, profane and profound about the psychological hinterlands that our families tend to occupy. Not only will it, as Greg Rucka promises in his blurb “leave you walking with its echoes for days to come.”, you’ll find yourself marvelling over a clever (seemingly throwaway) line of dialogue and re-assessing the book’s content every time you think of its ending. It’s that good.

(this piece previously appeared on Needle Scratch Static)