The Kitchen

Vertigo Comics has been going through a Renaissance of sorts and this story is part of that new push.  If you love crime noir or any type of mob movies this is a book for you.  If there is one other title I could compare this to it would be History of Violence.  The whole idea behind this book is that the wives of three Irish gangsters step up to run the business.  The three Irish hoods go to prison because they got arrested for beating the crap out of somebody.  Jimmy, Johnny and Rob go to prison but their absence has left a vacuum in Hell’s Kitchen.  Enter their wives Kath, Raven and Angie this book starts off pretty tame low level crime the wives are just collecting for their husbands while they are in prison but people keep shorting them on the payments.  This pisses off Kath to the breaking point and when she snaps she winds up putting the relative of someone in the Italian mob in a coma.  That’s not the worst of it however someone saw the whole thing go down.  But this witness doesn’t want justice he thinks that because its just a group of women that he can blackmail them.  This is where the book takes it dark turn down the road towards a life of crime.

The girl’s team joins forces with Tommy to run the Irish gang in Hell’s Kitchen.  Tommy is Jimmy’s best friend but he has just escaped a mental hospital.  The book gives very little back story to the characters throughout its tale.  We do learn that Kath and Raven are sisters but once the book takes that deeper dive into organized crime we see that Kath isn’t as in charge as we expected her to be.  Angie really changes as she becomes the enforcer for the group learning from Tommy everything that she can.  The women make deals with the Jews and the Italians over the course of the story to completely take over Hell’s Kitchen.  While their husbands have been locked up the girls reputations have surpassed their own they are released early.  What they find when they return to the streets is that the women want nothing to do with them anymore.  Raven is in deep with the Italians, Kath wants Jimmy to treat her equally as a partner and Angie has become independent.

The husbands try to take out Tommy but it doesn’t work.  One by one the husbands fall to the women as they find they don’t have the credibility on the street that they once had.  But as the girls continue to climb the higher they begin to split apart.  Raven takes control of everything Kath kind of checks herself and Angie and Tommy take off for brighter shores.  Later on Kath and Raven are talking and Raven confesses all she has done that Kath was too weak to do even killing someone she thought was going to drag Kath down over time.  This sets the two sisters to fighting and Kath is killed when she falls on a kitchen knife.  The story doesn’t end there as Raven continues to climb the ladder to success only to meet a very The Departed style end when she arrives home one night to find Tommy and Angie there.

Looking at this series as a whole I can’t say I’m impressed but I wasn’t expecting much from it anyway.  I feel this could have been longer by including lots of character development and exposition.  Probably my biggest complaint of this series was the art as a whole.  I think the colors worked really well for this story I love the whole opening scene but I have a problem with the framing and perspective of the artist’s work some of the drawings are just painful to look at.  I didn’t like History of Violence the book or the movie but if you liked either of those I am sure you will like this.