There are car chases, plenty of gun fights, a mugging - the list goes on. Sean Phillips doesn’t want the flashy action scenes to take center stage in this comic. Max even thinks to himself at one point, “I guess when you’ve lived this long, your silences can say as much as your words.” It’s Brubaker’s empathy for the character - his refusal to drag Max back through his painful past for the sake of exposition - that gives this graphic novel its understated brilliance. His inability to revisit the details tells us more than any explanation about his wife and daughter could. Max refuses to go into further detail, even in his own mind. We know Max had a wife and daughter, but it’s only ever inferred what happened to them. Revelations in this graphic novel have a habit of happening “off panel.” Max talks about his brother’s death almost nonchalantly, and the death isn’t even shown. This could feel more like sitting down for a lecture than reading a comic, if Brubaker didn’t only tell us what we need to know to understand the character.

He’s contemplating his place in the world and what he’s going to be leaving his wife when he’s gone. There’s a lot of text on every page of this comic, yet it feels quiet, because most of what is written is going on in Max’s head. Under “understated” in the dictionary, there should be a note that says “see: Pulp.” It’s literally a comic about cowboys and nazis, yet it spends more time on Winter’s fear of old age and death. But this creative team makes it feel fresh by dialing back the action and romanticization, and allowing their main characters’ fears and dreams to take precedence. An old man, Max Winter, with his glory days behind him, is given one last shot to stand against injustice and possibly go out in a blaze of glory. Written by Ed Brubaker with art and lettering by Sean Phillips and colors by Jacob Phillips, Image Comics’ Pulp is a fresh spin on a plot we’ve seen before.

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