The first word that comes to mind in describing Rafael Grampá's Mesmo Delivery is harrowing, and the second word is beautiful. That implies that it's more harrowing than beautiful, but I'd be hard pressed to tell whether that is actually the case.
The Brazilian artist, recently celebrated thanks to his fortuitous placement on the creative team that won the 2008 Eisner for best anthology, produces his first full-length work in Mesmo, and it's a hell of a debut. Not to denigrate Grampá's talent in any way-- I'm clearly very impressed with this book-- but of the five artists in the Eisner-winning work, he's the unknown newcomer (he was teamed with Gabriel Ba, Fabio Moon, Becky Cloonan and Vasilis Lolos, for goodness' sake). Mesmo is really coming out of nowhere, and Chris Pitzer must be seriously pleased to have this on the AdHouse roster.
It's hard to praise a work like this without either giving the story away or simply heaping superlatives into an untidy pile in trying to describe the art. Take a look at the preview pages below to see what the book looks like. Some nice inking and coloring there (the colors are by Marcus Penna, but Grampá picked out the palette). Some of the fight scenes are stunningly well-staged; they go way beyond the basic you-can-always-tell-exactly-who-is-who and into the rococo (during a character's beheading, we see the knife passing through his neck by looking down his throat. Wow).
Every character in this book could be described as ugly, both physically and morally. But it's the kind of beautiful ugly that makes you want to keep looking. Like a Johnny Cash murder song or (probably a more obvious comparison) a Quentin Tarantino film, Mesmo draws you into an amazingly tidy story with a cast that can't reasonably be called either heroes or villains. There are larger-than-life characters here, but their reactions are all completely human. The English dialogue is by Ivan Brandon, presumably from Grampá's script, and the naturalistic tone is great. I love it when people in stories swear nonsensically when they get excited--"You're fucked, you sonova fuck!" Nothing draws me out of a story faster than someone using language you wouldn't hear in real life.
I hate to make the comparison, but Mesmo Delivery does call to mind Reservoir Dogs. The level of violence, and the realistic consequences of it, in terms of blood and pain; the amoral tone; the perfect dialogue; and above all the sense that you're experiencing the first major work by a talent who is going to take the world by storm. Be looking for Rafael Grampá at the Eisners. Again.
