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Peepland #2

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    Ian Jane
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  • Peepland #2



    Peepland #2
    Released by: Titan Comics
    Released on: November 30th, 2016.
    Written by: Christa Faust, Gary Philips
    Illustrated by: Andrea Camerini
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    “Following a chance encounter with public access pornographer, Dirty Dick Durbin, Peepshow worker, Roxy Bell, found herself in possession of a crucial piece of evidence: a videotape identifying the infamous Central Park Slayer. But with a target now on her back, Roxy and her ex-boyfriend, Nick Nunzio, have some tough decisions to make regarding their next move...”

    That all happened in issue one (reviewed here). This second issue starts off in the back of a limo. Two men hold a woman back and watch as a third man snorts a line of blow off of a prostitute's breasts. He tells her they're going to play a game, to see how long she can hold her breath. The prostitute protests and gets smacked for speaking up. The girl that was being held is kicked out of the car as it slows down in Times Square and the man who did the blow? He strangles the hooker to death.

    Roxy and Nick see all of this happen on the tape. They rewind it to get a better look at the killer… and the VCR chews it up. Nick gets the tape out but isn't sure he can fix it so they talk to Roxy's neighbor, Snyder. They lie to him about what's on the tape. He agrees to fix it for a fee, and Roxy agrees to shoot some ads for him free of charge. Snyder appears to have his fingers in a few different pies, he's got a whole lot of video editing gear setup in his apartment.

    Meanwhile Ray and Benny, the two thugs from the first issue, have to tell their boss, a paunchy real estate developer with bad hair named Simon Went, that they've come up empty. They don't have the tape he wants. He sends them back out into the city to make it right. In another part of town, the cops are looking for a black kid named Lorenzo Nichols. They find him, rough him up, and accuse him of being involved in the Central Park murder of a white woman. He doesn't know what they're talking about he tells them, but this doesn't stop the cops from throwing him in the back of a cruiser and hauling him in. Turns out Lorenzo is the son of Aiesha, one of the girl from the peepshow where Roxy works. The cops interrogate him, an NYPD beat cop placed them at the scene of the crime, but again, Lorenzo says he's innocent. Aiesha shows up at the station and says that the talk is over until they get a lawyer.

    As Snyder fixes the tape, he plays it back. On the TV next to him, Went is holding a press conference with his wife and son in attendance. As he sees the two screens side by side, he figures out pretty quickly that the footage on Roxy's tape is real and that the strangler in the video is the perfect target for a blackmail scheme.

    Meanwhile, Aiesha realizes that in order to help her kid, she's going to need a good lawyer, not a public defender who will sell him out for a plea bargain. A.J. knows she hasn't got the money to pay for that, so she decides to help.

    Lots of stuff going on in this issue as the storyline blends fiction and reality (we're clearly dealing with the infamous Central Park Five case here when the cops grab Lorenzo and accuse he and his pals of killing a white woman and Simon Went is obviously based on Donald Trump). The plot moves along nicely here and as we get to know the different characters that populate this sleazy locale, their world starts to open up to us in interesting ways. If the first issue was more action intensive, this second chapter would seem to be slowing down simply to build character and plot - that's a good thing, and it succeeds in that quite nicely. Even if you take away the novelty of the eighties era Times Square setting, there's a good story being told here that blends mystery, politics and criminality in interesting ways.

    Andrea Camerini's artwork is good. There's a nice sense of movement to much of the faster paced pages and good background detail, particularly when the story heads out into the streets. The characters are well drawn and their facial expressions really effective, helping to give sufficient impact to the dialogue and the storyline.

    The last few pages of this issue are interesting too, as here Christa Faust offers up some memories of her own time spent living and working in and around Times Square before it became the Disneyfied tourist trap it is now. It also informs the sensibility behind her writing in this comic - it is, as she puts it, 'a love letter to my old stomping grounds' and it helps us to understand better how and why she writes the peepshow employees in this comic the way that she does.





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