A bounty hunter heroine and a couple of deadbeats. Jinx kicks off our top 100.
Before he became top writer at Marvel, Brian Michael Bendis wrote and illustrated Jinx. Black and white and full of dialogue, Jinx is a crime noir spin on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Just take away the cowboys and bandits and add a female bounty hunter and two grifters (if you don't know, a grifter is a practitioner of confidence tricks. Leonardo di Caprio in Catch me if you Can is the ultimate grifter).
Jinx isn't about gunfights, explosions and capes. You don't get the common graphic novel collection of superheroes with powers no real person could have; instead you get three ordinary people tangled in a crime caper, and this is where Jinx excels - the characters. What makes Jinx one of the best graphic novels is the depth Bendis gives his characters.
The title character, Jinx, is a female bounty hunter desperate to avoid a slide into a life of crime that has swallowed everyone she knows. Her flaw is her loneliness, and to this end she gets messed up with two grifters, Goldfish and Columbia (Bendis himself served as a model for Columbia). Goldfish, nice guy grifter, is trying to claw his way out of the conman life he has spent so much time in, while Columbia, dumb grifter, gets swept wherever his foolish actions take him.
Bendis goes to great pains to make his characters, and the world they live in, real enough to touch. This is in a large part down to the realistic, and lengthy, dialog that's sprayed throughout the book. Bendis isn't interested in creating something you can skim through, half-wondering whether the heroes find the treasure. He wants us to breath in this world.
To do this he makes some seriously bold choices, like a nineteen page segment where background characters in a shopping mall, extras almost, are given something to say. They have their own lives, dilemmas and needs, and they tell us them. And then they are never seen again. Yet we feel sucked into Jinx's world because of it.
Jinx is what happens when Tarantino gets fused into a comic and twisted with Sergio Leone. A successful series, and one that propelled Bendis to the top of the graphic novel world, Jinx is one of the best graphic novels ever written, and some say it is Bendis' greatest work. It isn't stopping there either; there are plans to put Jinx on the big screen, with Bendis writing and Charlize Theron attached to star.
Comic Books Magazine
