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Won't you stop and remember me... a review of Tumor

We forget things all the time.  We forget to stop by the store to pick up some milk on the way home.  We forget to put the toilet seat back down.  We forget where we left the car keys but they always seem to end up in the last place we look.  Memory is fickle that way; it can be fleeting at the moment you least want or need it to be.  Luckily, the milk, car keys or the toilet seat end up being not that important in the grand scheme of things but they are things we all forget.  Now imagine you started forgetting bigger things; you wake up in the hospital and the last thing you remember was standing outside of a noodle factory with someone who may want to kill you.  Or you forget that your wife died years ago, caught up in the mess that you created.  Or imagine that the one thing you can remember is a doctor telling you that you have a brain tumor.  For Frank Armstrong, a washed up private detective, his memory doesn't exist anymore as he begins reliving his past and mistaking it for his present, making the same mistakes again even as he tries to protect a girl on the run from her father.

In Joshua Hale Fialkov and Noel Tuazon's Tumor, their followup to 2007's Elk's Run, Frank Armstrong is living with a death sentence, a brain tumor.  There's nothing he can do about it but wait for the end.  But circumstances won't let him wait; he gets suckered into finding a mobster's daughter.  Evelyn ran away from home and her father wants her back.  Maybe this can be Frank's last hurrah, the last chance to be the hero he was never actually able to be during his life. 

Fialkov creates a delicate and fragile story.  The story has to be that because that's what his memory is to Frank- delicate and fragile.  His mission to rescue Evelyn, to be her savior, almost falls apart as Frank's memory falls apart.  Evelyn becomes his late wife Rosa in his eyes and he becomes the young man he once was, trying to protect his wife the same way he needs to protect Evelyn.  Fialkov uses Frank's brain tumor to look at the mistakes a man can make in his life and how, years later, he can still struggle to make those mistakes right. 

Or maybe Fialkov is saying that Frank is still making those same mistakes.  Tumor takes place in two distinct time periods, the now with Evelyn and in the past, shortly after Frank and Rosa's wedding.  There's nothing in between those two times even though there's years between them.  Fialkov shows Frank making mistakes in the past, failing Rosa, and here he is, apparently making the same mistakes with Evelyn even as he knows or at least can make some kind of connection with his past failures.  There's almost no past or present in this story as Fialkov and Tuazon smash the two time points together to tell Frank's story.  The past is happening in the present and the present happened in the past. 

Noel Tuazon's loose and hazy art perfectly grounds Frank as he loses his perspective between the past and the present.  Like Sean Phillips in Criminal or Darwyn Cooke in Parker, Tuazon creates a natural look to Frank's world.  With the plethora of crime books that have been out in the past year or two, the art is what really sets one work apart from another.  Phillips and Cooke creates visual worlds that you never question or doubt.  That's what Tuazon does in Tumor, creating a sketchy and hazy world that seems only as solid as Frank's memory is.

Tuazon's present is made up of solid but quickly sketched lines.  His present is there and real but it's not complete.  It's not sharp or detailed.  As Frank has to exist more and more in the moment, whether it's in the present with Evelyn or the past with Rosa, it almost feels like Tuazon is staying only one or two steps ahead of Frank, quickly scribbling walls, furniture, people action as it's happening.  Tuazon's art is immediate and it's happening now.  Even when he switches it up a bit, creating gray-washed images to reflect Frank's memory, there's still the feeling that Tuazon is right there, pen and brush in hand, finding out what's happening to Frank just ahead of Frank himself.  Tuazon's quick style perfectly mirrors the way that Frank is experiencing the last days or months of his life.  It's all happening now both in the story and in the art.

Tumor
Written by: Joshual Hale Fialkov
Drawn by: Noel Tuazon
Lettered by: Richard Starkings and Jimmy Betancourt

Tumor is available on Amazon.com.