Crime gets a Western noir spin for 'Dead Body Road'

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Justin Jordan is such a fan of crime literature that lately, his best procrastination technique is to read George Pelecanos.

He's done superheroes (Green Lantern: New Guardians) and teenage ultra-violence (the Luther Strode series), but crime is Jordan's favorite genre across the board and he's filtering it through a contemporary Western noir lens writing the upcoming six-issue Image Comics/Skybound miniseries Dead Body Road, announced Saturday at Comic-Con.

Debuting in November and featuring artist Matteo Scalera (Indestructible Hulk), the series sends an ex-cop named Gage on a mission of ultimate vengeance when his wife is killed during a bank robbery where the culprits were looking for more than just loot, and Gage makes it a point to dispatch every single one of them no matter what.

A crime book is something Jordan's always wanted to get into, he says, "but it's a hard sell in comics in general. It's something in the last 20 years that's been hugely popular."

Jordan talks with USA TODAY about Dead Body Road and what character on your TV might resemble Gage the most.

Q: With a lot of comics, it doesn't seem like people go for straight crime. It's more like crime plus something else, like Fatale's supernatural bent or Incognito's supervillain spin. There's some Western leanings in Dead Body Road.

It is set in the modern day — I don't want people to think it's Jonah Hex or Lawless. I was a big fan of Westerns as a kid, and I actually still am — not to the extent that I've gone to see The Lone Ranger as yet but a general thing.

I like the aesthetic and I spent some time in West Texas just getting to experience the actual desert and areas that are actually kinda desolate still. You can go miles and miles and miles without seeing a building, and the harshness of the terrain has a lot to do with the tone and feel of the book for me. I wanted to do a Western-type thing set in a modern setting so it's got a real desert-dry feel to it.

And like I said, I like crime and thrillers, so I wanted to see if I could cross some of that with the noir sensibilities and see what we've got.

Q: What can you say about Gage and his story?

Gage is the one who is trying to be responsible for most of the dead bodies on said road. He was a cop at one point and after a series of events, in his mind losing his job is what directly led to the death of his wife, which is why he's tracking down and killing the people he believes were responsible for her death. Of course, the person he really holds responsible is himself.

To a certain extent he's doing this and I wouldn't call him suicidal but he doesn't expect or care if he survives it himself as long as he gets the people he's going after.

Q: So, we're talking a definite death wish.

Yes, which informs his approach. He ends up partnering with some people who would really, really prefer to live so that becomes problematic. He needs those people to get what he wants, and at the same time they need him to get what they want, but they're trying to all not get killed except for him.

Q: What does Matteo bring to the overall book and characters?

Energy. One of the things you can most say about Matteo's art is that it brings a tremendous sense of motion to it. He really gets the kind of desolate feel, the big empty feel that I wanted from the book.

When they told me that Matteo was going to be on the book, I very nearly did a happy dance. What he is putting on the page is in fact as cool or most often way cooler than what I had in mind.

Working with a bunch of artists now, I can feel almost immediately whether or not we're going to get into that groove and how it's going to come out. It's something about the way you think and approach storytelling, and that's reflected in other things, to get all faux-philosophical about it.

Q: Did you find any outside influences finding their way into the series?

I will tell you that aside from the general crime-novel influences, this book has very much become my love letter to Justified and Sons of Anarchy. So apparently I'm a huge FX junkie and it probably shows in this book.

Q: Is Gage similar to one of the characters in those shows, like one of the SAMCRO gang?

Actually, demeanor-wise he's probably close to Tim (played by Jacob Pitts) on Justified — he has a sense of humor but he is fairly reserved. You're getting to see him when he is in dire straits, so he's maybe a little different than he would have been in his regular life beforehand. We'll probably get to see parts of that during the course of the thing — the arc he's on is recovering from this guilt that he probably has unfairly placed on his own shoulders. Hopefully people will be interested in that story.