Review by C.J. Bunce
Taiwan creator Rio is seeing the first volume of her hitman series translated to English this month thanks to Titan Manga in the graphic novel Unemployed Killers Support Group, available now at comic books stores and here at Amazon. The book has all the elements of your standard manhua, but it’s read forward to back, and Rio’s artwork has the look and feel of your typical crime manga or manhua. Locker Loyed (yep, that’s how she spells it) was a successful enough hitman, until someone bigger came along and he ended up permanently blind. Now with an assistance dog named Bourbon he’s out of work, out of money, and out of luck. Thankfully he’s in Los Angeles, where there is a support group for everything. Tarantino/Rodriguez dark comedy meets Gregory Garcia’s Sprung in the first volume of a story about hard luck hitting everyone in the 21st century.
The Sprung comparison is the closest you may find to this story. What do hitmen do when they don’t do their job well? One of the guys in the group says he’s good at cooking. Locker himself says he’s good at climbing a few dozen flights of stairs. But since he’s blind that… skill… won’t even land him a gig moving someone’s furniture.
The support group only includes Jerry, Maze, and Joe, before Locker is kindly referred by his previous broker. Jerry runs the group. He’s a former lawyer who decided the law wasn’t doing enough to get criminals off the street. Maze was hired for a hit by a gangster who thought his wife was cheating. Turns out Maze showed up to catch her in the act and found her husband as the guy in bed with her. She kills the woman instead of her husband, which sets up all sorts of psychiatric issues for Maze. Plus, everyone who hears her story chastises her for killing the wrong person. Locker isn’t too bright and just makes it all worse.
Joe lives at home with his mom, like Rooster in the Sprung series. Joe has ideas he shares with Locker about possible job opportunities, but they’re all bad. The best idea seems to be to go after the guy who blinded Locker. The dark comedy of the story is actually very light. Rio leans into the conceit of feeling sorry for murderers in a way that we’d normally see in coming of age manga tales. She has a pretty good grasp on Los Angeles crime dramas, although Americans will catch some errors along the way, like phone numbers written in mock Asian order versus the North American seven-digits. None of these things are material.
For fans of hapless criminal stories like Sunny Nights, dark drama mixed with comedy like the Gecko brothers in From Dusk Til Dawn, or loners getting through their day like in Matt Fraction’s Hawkeye series, check out Rio’s manga-esque graphic novel Unemployed Killers Support Group. Request it from Elite Comics, your local comic shop, or grab a copy here at Amazon.
