Tumor

Tumor makes for a nice if fast read. It’s an L.A. noir book and it’s a story that works great in comic book format. The creative team here is a couple of guys who I am completely unfamiliar with...Joshua Hale Fialkov writes and Noel Tuazon draws. Also, it’s published by a company that I really have never dipped into: Archaia. Tumor is a stark black and white book with simple art and a story that keeps rolling.

This review might be a little unusual in that I want to make sure that I devote some attention to this book as a nifty little physical object. I learned that Tumor was originally published in installments exclusively for the Kindle and that this hardcover collection is the big finished project. It pretty much looks like it was designed to be a standalone graphic novel. What we have here is two hundred pages of noir excitement and a whole bunch of extras. Supplementary prose stories, interviews, concept art, and a big look at the earlier versions of the project fill up forty pages once the story is over. The book is a high quality bound hardcover with some really nice and thick paperstock. It’s just a nice thing to have sitting on the shelf!

The interview with Fialkov is reprinted from Ain’t It Cool News. I really liked what I read. Fialkov seems like a smart guy who knows the direction things are going in. There are questions that are asked about digital distribution, and his position is that it just makes a whole lot of sense for indie comics publishers to be looking into this sort of thing. With the costs that Diamond imposes and the pitiful numbers that a new indie can expect to sell, why not look into a digital distribution model?

“For me, digital first with a well designed, extras-loaded collection is the way of the future,” Fialkov said. Well, this is exactly what they did with Tumor, and I’d have to say that it looks like it worked out pretty well.

So how about a little discussion of the story in Tumor? As would be expected from the title, the main character is on the verge of death from a brain tumor. Frank Armstrong has lived a pretty long life for a lifelong criminal and this is his swan song. There’s just one last set of trouble to deal with, and it really isn’t giving much of the plot away to mention the final words of the book, supplied by Frank’s narration: “This is the story of how I died. Of all the things I did wrong. And the only thing I ever did right.”

There’s plenty to enjoy in Tumor. The thing that makes it stand apart from the countless other noir comics out there is how Fialkov and Tuazon melded Frank’s past and present into a complex narrative. The brain tumor is wearing him down, and we can see just how bad things are getting when he’s so completely confused by what is real and what used to be real, what he should worry about and what it is far too late to even care about anymore. Because of the subject matter, tone, and a little bit of the art style, reading Tumor reminded me of the Darwyn Cooke Parker books. I feel like that is considerable praise to pile onto a crime graphic novel these days.


If you’re looking for a quick-paced modern comic that has a nice design to it, try out Tumor. Actually, this is the kind of graphic novel that is perfect for people who are “too ashamed” to be caught reading a comic in public. It looks like a normal hardcover book, and little will anyone know what’s really inside...