Classic Comic Compendium: CRYING FREEMAN

Crying Freeman was another of Kazuo Koike‘s body of work that I experienced first as a movie long before I even knew that it was a comic. Its provenance for me not just being an early work (his feature directorial debut actually) by Silent Hill and Brotherhood of the Wolf director, Christophe Gans’, catalogue, but a sombre gangster film largely shot and set in Vancouver. I still think it’s funny that for a city that tears down and rebuilds its past so often, one of the landmarks that hasn’t really changed as depicted in the movie is the Vancouver Art Gallery on Robson.

Marc Dacascos in the titular role delivering an understated, mostly stoic performance and the grimness giving the entire movie a feel not too dissimilar to The Crow. I re-watched it last summer going through Gans’ filmography and largely enjoyed it. It’s not an underrated, forgotten gem, but it’s still a solid enough action movie. It was only recently that I finally read the manga.

“I’m probably going to be assassinated…because I witnessed a murder. Because I saw the killer’s face too clearly.”

Crying Freeman – Volume 1 by Kazuo Koike & Ryoichi Ikegami with Kumar Sivasubramanian and Kathryn introduces us to the titular assassin with two serials, the complete “Mr. Yo” and the opening chapters of “Falling Blossoms, Flowing Water”. It sets up Emu Hino, a painter, as the sole living witness to an assassination by Crying Freeman and plunges us into a world of the Chinese Mafia, the Yakuza, and tension that could lead to a full blown gang war. But largely circles around Hino’s pivotal role as a trap for the assassin and their mostly forbidden love affair.

Despite the locale change, and excising a large portion of the origin story and appending a new-ish ending, the Gans film is actually fairly faithful to the opening “Mr. Yo” serial. There’s much more complexity and eroticism in the manga, though that’s largely to be expected. There’s a weird pull between the two main characters, a thoroughly strange conditioning and training for the assassin, and a brutal, detailed violence in all of the gang sequences.

The artwork by Ryoichi Ikegami is sublime. There’s a level of detail in his characters and locations that are just gorgeous. The facial expressions of his characters add a lot of swagger and disdain, particularly among the villains, that really make these criminals feel like scum. Ikegami seems to have perfected noir and yakuza genre conventions here, giving it a very compelling visual style. Not to mention that of Koike’s works, this is one of the prominent ones in a more contemporary setting.

“An assassin who can win over the hearts of women in this will be immortal, as you have now become!”

Crying Freeman – Volume 1 by Koike & Ikegami with Sivasubramanian and Renta is an adult crime thriller, with elements of a tragic romance as the assassin falls in love with someone who should have been his target. The complexity of the relationship, of something that ostensibly shouldn’t be, elevates this beyond just another gang piece. Even with the added depth of the criminal underworld and Crying Freeman’s origin as depicted here. With some seriously incredible art from Ikegami.

I think of Koike’s non Lone Wolf & Cub works, this might quickly have become my favourite.