Every review I’ve previously read of this book has featured some sort of comparison to Sin City. I’ve never been a big Sin City fan, but aside from a few artistic similarities, the comparison with Filler seems slightly specious to me. Frank Miller’s stories have always focused on the high adventure aspects of dark and gritty noir — Raymond Chandler and his ilk as filtered through Jack Kirby. Other than the fact that Filler is also in black and white with occasional splashes of red, there’s no real thematic similarities to be found.

Which is, all things considered, a good thing. This is about as far from the hyperkinetic fields of Miller’s Town Without Pity as you can conceive: this is a dirty, muggy, unpleasant book filled with petty crooks and flat-out losers, most of whom look like they wouldn’t survive a fall from their chair, let-alone a tall building onto a speeding car. This is noir in the classical sense, with a too-clever-by-half femme fatale stringing along a hapless hulk of a male protagonist until the inevitable double- and triple-crosses close the story on an appropriately nasty note. To its credit, despite a few problems, the book manages to construct a better approximation of true noir than most other comics I’ve ever read, Sin City included.

The problem with Filler is that it essentially tries to have it both ways: it wants to be both a by-the-numbers potboiler as well as something slightly more clever. To a degree, it works, but only to a degree. The story is enjoyable on face value merely as a well-told tale of criminal behavior, and some of the attempts at pulling the book out of this mode in the third act in order to provide a slightly meta-textual twist fall flat. These kinds of stories, when done well, exert a strange fascination simply by virtue of showing us men and women pulled past their limits and deep into the inescapable realms of deceit and violence. As nasty as they are, noir stories will never fall short of source material in terms of man’s capability to commit nastiness on one another. As far as that goes, Filler is pretty damn nasty.

Rick Spears and Rob G. built something of a reputation in the first years of the decade with Teenagers From Mars, an action fantasy built on an overheated foundation of teen angst and pop-culture references. Filler couldn’t be more different in tone and execution, from the understated atmosphere to the blocky art. Gone are the dramatic compositions and scratchy details of Mars, replaced by Miller-esque blotches of spotted blacks. If the artistic overreach occasionally allows the team’s relative inexperience to show through, this can be forgiven.

The overripe symbolism that runs through the book can be occasionally distracting. The unmemorable protagonist is named Jon Dough, and the lady who does him wrong is named Debra Cross — get it? “Double” Cross? Subtle it ain’t, but that is to be expected: all that matters is that the morality be ambiguous, not the plot points. Whether or not the last act of the book reads as too-cute-for-its-own-good is entirely up to you, and I’m of two minds whether or not it works for me. But thankfully the straightforward enjoyment of the story is not entirely dependent on buying the thematic twist that comes at the end, so even if it’s only partially successful, it’s no more than partially detrimental, either.

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