Mesmo Delivery has a very strange aspect to it, aside from it being a proper exploitation comic and lot of what makes it amazing is gut-level reactions in the reader. At the same time, its a comic about being an artist. When the panel above pops up towards the end of the book, after one of the two leads Sangreco has spent the entire story talking about art and Elvis and showmanship, it takes on larger significance. The line recalls one of my favorite Walken line readings - ”A man can be an artist… in anything, food, whatever. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece”. Rafael Grampa has been compared to Frank Quitely, Paul Pope, and Geoff Darrow. His work doesn’t so much as share visual similarities with those artists (while there are some), as it is a way to say that Grampa has an idiosyncratic approach to movement, page design, and character design. In short, Rafael Grampa is a guy who’s showing up with a complete worldview, like those guys. When even the best comics artists take years of middling work to get to that point, it’s something that needs to be mentioned. This is the comics of a new voice, and rarer still, its a book that entertains ideas about what it means to be an artist.
Of course, this is just the first thing that Grampa has released in the US, and it’s a re-release at that. I couldn’t tell you if he has a large back catalog of work where he banged his style into what it is or if this is arriving fully-formed as a debut comic. I don’t think it matters. The comic is an artists showcase, too – to some extent it’s Rafael Grampa showing off. Actually in all extents, this is some show-off comics. This is a gauntlet being thrown down, Stooges debut performance, Nasty Nas debut album shit. This is angry young man comics, showing how he can do this and they can’t. And it works. It’s legitimately an announcement of Rafael Grampa’s name being on something is automatically worth your dime.
Mesmo Delivery is an exploitation comic. There isn’t a character arc involved here, there isn’t even a morality tale, or an examination of behavior. The innate nature of exploitation film, comics, etc. in their long history, is that you gravitate to them for the strange artistry that trash can appear in the best trash. The genre cinema of the world, where trash can turn into greatness from scene to scene, the EC comics that had some of the best comics artists drawing stories of guys drowning. Either that, or you gravitate to it because you want to see the reprehensible, the violent, the screwed up. Those competing notions exist in Mesmo Delivery, sometimes in the same moment. The story – a Twilight Zone meets Peckinpah riff about a truck stop: a fight between two guys – one comically huge and one with a screw-on oversized Warner Bros. fist, an Elvis-listening martial arts assassin, a faceless and mysterious boss giving ominous orders – it’s nothing that immediately grabs. But then again, stories like this are always about execution. Which of course is the reason you buy comics for the art – the dream sequence page, the up-angle of the girl pissing herself, the shot of the devil, the inside-the-mouth zoom-in and cutaway, the lilting way the Elvis lyrics move across the page – this is the first time you can see anything like this and he knows it.
But for all the exploitation fireworks going on in this book, all the look-at-what-I-can-do bravura skill here, there is something more going on in Mesmo Delivery, and it has to do with being an artist. There is the narrative sophistication of the best Twilight Zones (ie the Matheson ones) here. It’s not a twist or a tragedy, but a shift from one sense of story to another – a 70s trucker fight comic into a mordant story of a killer who feels undervalued. The two leads, Rufo and Sangreco, only interact at the beginning and end of the story. The shift between the two modes is actually tied to Rufo being knocked out, and Sangreco acting while he knows Rufo won’t know about it. By doing this, the way the book treats protagonists as antithetical, isn’t the kind of thing you’re expecting from exploitation. Sangreco’s talk about himself as an artist – I’m not about to say thats Grampa himself talking, but there is always something interesting in art about artists. The uncomfortable nature about talking what you do can yield some interesting results. The killer-as-artist, that’s not new. Thats an idea running pretty deep in every culture. Sangreco’s dialog at the start of the book, where he says he’s a better Elvis, and he gets called a “cheap-ass imitation”, it hits home and he doesn’t show it. Sangreco’s art is something he has to keep hidden to survive, because that art, as Christopher Walken told us, is killing. He feels like a performer, and the way he talks to the bartender is that of an artist yearning to be recognized. In a riff on the old, the bartender-got-it-the-worst scene in all these stories, the bartender tells Sangreco he didn’t see anything. To him, it shows that even when he does his best, it’s never going to be seen for the art it is. A true artist does what he can, not to show off the story says. The contradiction is that Mesmo Delivery is the kind of showcase that only an artist with these inclinations could possibly pull off. Maybe it’s only with that contradiction that exploitation can truly be art, or maybe it’s just skill and nothing else matters.
Either way, this does what it should do and more.
