Eric Powell & Tim Weisch
‘Big Man Plans’ is a revenge story of a small
man that has been beaten up and mistreated all this life, making him bitter
and super-violent. As a child, the only true sympathetic voices came from his
father and a girl named Holly, who he of course falls in love with. We join him
as he starts on a path of vengeance. The narrative goes back and forth between
his wreaking vengeance and flashbacks to an unhappy and abused past, giving a
foundation as to why he is who he is and why he says the tagline, “I’m here to
rage and get respect.”
Eric Powell’s art mostly concentrates on
faces and figures and the violence drawn is surely the kind that people
demanding The Comics Code couldn’t have dared imagined in their wildest
nightmares. That is, it’s outrageous, gory and extreme. The flashbacks,
however, are conveyed in more detail, because it was surely a bigger world for
him back then, not just concentrating upon enacting revenge on hideous
wrongdoers. He learns early on to react with double the force that those that
beat on him and insult him expect. He is probably afflicted with some form of
PTSD long before he is enlisted by the army for secret missions that take
advantage of his size. And there is some comedy with vignettes of people he
spared telling their kids a bogeyman story of “the tiniest version of death.”
It is these flashbacks that give pathos
to the story, giving its single-minded intent to depict graphic violence some
weight. Of course, the antagonists are far deserving of what they receive,
being despicable in the extreme, so we don’t really have to question the
revenge visited upon them too much. The bitter and visceral nature of the story
scours the page, leading the narrative by force away from the sadness deep down
that our protagonist carries. Relevantly, there is a look of fear and sadness
on his face when, as a child, he first fights back (“Chin up.”). It’s in these
details that Powell and Weisch’s stripped-down brutal vengeance tale substance.
It’s a story of someone that never had a chance and the unending nature of
violence.
