Garth Ennis and Craig Cermak have been unspooling a really compelling story with Red Team, about a group of cops who set up strict moral guidelines about when they’ll set about taking the law into their own hands and killing bastards they can’t nail legally. They had a very specific set or rules (outlined in my previous Red Team review) and made a point to cover all the bases genre readers want covered, determined to be the most competent and discreet pack of vigilantes ever, and in issue #1, the worst thing possible happened – everything went off without a hitch. They got a taste for it, and they kept at it.
However, they’ve found out in the last couple of issues that they weren’t the first ones to have this idea, and the pack of bastard cops doing these black ops before them are doing it for money, out of sheer corruption. So Red Team #7 is the climax and finale to this series, when our gang goes up against The O’Dwyer Posse, and things get ugly and bloody, as they’re wont to do in Ennis stories. We also learn who’s been interrogating Eddie and Trudy, the last survivors of Red Team, and what their futures are going to be as we watch them figure it out themselves.
I won’t give out spoilers, since this is the end of the series and it’s not out until next week, but suffice it to say Ennis continues doing the great job he’s been doing in setting up this team of wish-fulfillment ultimate killers-of-people-want-killed and making us simultaneously root for them to succeed and root for them to stop at the same time. We never lose sight of the moral question of whether or not this is right, as so often happens in other books about vigilantes, because we see the struggle in Eddie between the allure of getting things done that they can’t accomplish in any other way and knowing that becoming a self-appointed death squad leads to becoming a motherfucker like O’Dwyer. Eddie and Trudy’s interrogator brings it home in Red Team #7, realizing it sounds sexy, but what it amounts to is private armies. Ennis also ends the story with a great little swerve that makes us realize one more reason why this kind of thing is a recurring problem. Also, Cermak continues to be perfectly spare and moody with the artwork, never letting the tone and feel of the story go too far into the spectacular or unreal, which keeps everything grounded in the cold reality the Red Team set out to deal with.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Garth Ennis can tell a fuckin’ story. This one isn’t as soul-crushing as Fury: My War Gone By, but it sure as hell ain’t a walk in the park, neither.
