Turf

Guardian Review

Comics often throw familiar figures together - you don't have to look far to find not only Batman battling the Joker and Superman fighting Lex Luther, but also Superman being ambushed by Batman and his pet dinosaur. Yet as the Hollywood adaptations of Cowboys & Aliens and Alien vs Predator show, mixing genres and franchises may result in an appealing concept and some nice merchandise, but often gives us lumpen fiction. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise to see Jonathan Ross - a man with a taste for geekery and an eye for a belly laugh - step off the light entertainment sofa and into the fray. His wife Jane Goldman co-wrote the comic-book-inspired films Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, and Ross said last year that "my love affair with comics is more important to me than my love of films, or my work in TV, or just about anything outside my family.".His exuberant debut, a graphic novel collecting all five instalments of his comic Turf, is set in a well-evoked 1920s New York of grim violence and glamorous parties. It's prohibition; the gangs keep the police at bay with bribes and enforce an uneasy truce with each other at the end of a baseball bat. The balance is shattered when Gregori and Stefan Dragonmir move from eastern Europe to Brooklyn. They start by ordering blood rather than booze from the syndicates, and then Stefan walks, unarmed, into a mafia boss's hotel suite and makes threats before a forest of gun barrels. The noisy carnage that results is met with a big-city shrug, but looking away is unlikely to help Gotham survive the next stage of the vampire clan's plan - the fulfilment of an ancient prophecy that will enslave mankind. As you might expect, New York's lowlifes choose sides - most rediscover their civic pride and band together to fight the new menace, while one psychopath joins the vampires. Eddie Falco, ruler of the East Side, heads across town looking for allies, and journalist Susie Randall takes a break from covering society weddings to seek out the truth. They are joined by a lovelorn gun-running alien named Squeed, who has conveniently crashlanded just outside the city with his cargo. Squeed's presence makes it vampires and serial killers versus hoodlums, broads and aliens, setting the scene for nasty violence, improbable cross-species couplings, interplanetary bromance and hard-boiled, sometimes leaden dialogue ("Great . . . Now I got no hand") that spills around the edges of the book's rich panels. Artist Tommy Lee Edwards - whose previous work has taken in everything from Batman and Marvel 1985 to concept work for the Harry Potter movies - occasionally gives us something different, such as a dark pastiche of early 20th-century comics that recounts a bent cop's childhood. But his brush-and-ink illustrations mostly tell this lurid story straight, its noirish palette illuminated by blood, gunfire and flashes of extraterrestrial technology, its action nicely set off by Manhattan alleyways and skylines. Ross, meanwhile, offers plenty of referential nods and winks, but Turf is about exploiting cliches, not undermining them. The taut plotting means the book moves at an exhilarating canter, but the characters have little room to breathe, leaving the narrative dependent on predictable types. "I wanted to own the whole damn city," Falco says as he stands with his new Harlem allies and gleaming spaceship. "Now . . . now I just want to save it." Once you get past the neat premise, there's little that's really novel here, but pulp fiction is all about familiar shocks, and this infectious and gleeful piece of storytelling is full of drama. Vitally, it has as much love for its historical setting as it does for its fantastic heroes and villains. Turf's trick is not just to revel in this stuff, but to make a surprisingly coherent story out of it, in which tommy guns and spaceships sit together almost comfortably. Turf ends with a cheerfully hokey cliffhanger, suggesting there may be more to come - indeed, Ross is already planning another series set in a retirement home for superheroes. That may seem an obvious echo of Watchmen and The Incredibles, but Ross the writer feels far fresher and a lot more entertaining than the TV stalwart who spends his weekends chumming up to Lewis Hamilton and begging Sarah Jessica Parker to make Sex and the City 3. More books, less chat please, Wossy. To order Turf for pounds 13.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. - James Smart [Squeed]'s presence makes it vampires and serial killers versus hoodlums, broads and aliens, setting the scene for nasty violence, improbable cross-species couplings, interplanetary bromance and hard-boiled, sometimes leaden dialogue ("Great . . . Now I got no hand") that spills around the edges of the book's rich panels. Artist Tommy Lee Edwards - whose previous work has taken in everything from Batman and Marvel 1985 to concept work for the Harry Potter movies - occasionally gives us something different, such as a dark pastiche of early 20th-century comics that recounts a bent cop's childhood. But his brush-and-ink illustrations mostly tell this lurid story straight, its noirish palette illuminated by blood, gunfire and flashes of extraterrestrial technology, its action nicely set off by Manhattan alleyways and skylines. - James Smart.