Feb 02, 2023
SPOILERS. Light spoilers but, still.
What we have here is a book that exists in the universe of the popular and surreal indie game phenomenon, HOTLINE MIAMI and it's sequel, HOTLINE MIAMI: WRONG NUMBER from 2012 / 2015 respectively. Vol. 1 covers issues 1-4 of 8 (the rest collected in Vol.2).
HOTLINE MIAMI: WILDLIFE follows Chris Jenkins, fairly new to Miami, if not exactly rich then seemingly well off (guy has multiple video game cabinets in his house), but not all that happy. He's inattentive, prone to mood swings, likes his nose candy and a bit of an asshole to his friends and lovers.
We learn that there's a pretty damn good reason for these behaviors; Chris is originally from San Francisco, location of a Soviet nuke strike in 19
86. He wasn't there, but his entire family and life was - and now it's all gone in a blaze of radioactive fire.
Chris receives a package from a "patriotic organization" he's been donating to, with the promise that he can help set the scales right. In the package are a pair of firearms, ammo and a rubber rabbit mask.
Later that evening Chris receives a cryptic phone call with a coded message, including an address. After initially ignoring it, Chris gets into his feelings, has a little blow and heads to the destination given on the call.
He then sloppily lays waste to a group of Russian gangsters, barely surviving the ordeal himself. But he did. And he liked it.
If you've played the Hotline Miami games, you know what the book is about: a revenge cult bent on eradicating Russian influence from America. But that's not what the game is about. Not really.
The first game is a rumination on video game violence and how easily we conduct it. It's in 2D, but it's a game soaked in blood - human blood. You enter building, kill every single person you encounter to a pumping soundtrack and, when it's all done, you leave in silence over the carnage you've dealt out.
There's also a surreal, Lynchian vibe in that the game's protagonist, "Jacket", is an unreliable narrator and frequently has hallucinations after a kill job.
This aspect is wholly missing from Wildlife, which operates more or less as straight crime fiction with a side dish of alternative history.
For what it is, this collection is pretty good and has very accurate late 80s flavor; it has a flash of that garish neon of the game, but is more grounded. It even opts to give you an American post-punk soundtrack with Sonic Youth's 1987 masterpiece "Expressway to Yr Skull".
So, same universe, but a somewhat different aesthetic. What it lacks in the games surreality, it makes up with good dialog. During one of the scenes where Chris hangs out with his buddies, Blake and Vinnie, he shares a story about the singer of a fictional band, the Collisions. The singer had moved to Ecuador and started a cult with laughable beliefs. Vinnie says "and people really believe this bullshit?" to which Chris responds
"I don't know... maybe they're just tired of their jobs."
Writers Frederico Chemello and Maurizio Furini (not sure if one plotted and another did the writing or a mix of both) use a lot of plain, naturalistic language in WILDLIFE that is nice and grounds the characters (doubly so, as English is most likely a secondary language for the creators). This is good as the world where they exist seems nowhere near as brutal as it would be if a nuclear attack had happened. I mean we live in a world where 9/11 happened and the consequences have been a cascading wave of disaster even 22 years later. The world has been profoundly deformed. In WILDLIFE'S post-HOTLINE MIAMI: WRONG NUMBER world where the San Francisco nuke attack has happened, the only real difference seems to be a clandestine group offing a myriad of Russian gangsters. The world building could have been better but, it's a video game tie-in, what could one really expect?
The art, by Alberto Massaggia, is clean and mixes a European line with figure work that reminds me of late 80s/early 90s Keith Giffen. The colors (also by Massaggia) are good, though being HOTLINE MIAMI, they could have been more garish - at least for the raids?
Anyway, a few subplots arise that, frankly, aren't really very realistic, but maybe they'll pan out?
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