Road to Perdition Max Allan Collins & Richard Piers Rayner

This made a better movie than a comic book. The comic, on which the movie was based, is a unique masterpiece visually, but the plot is pretty weak. Several plot points were streamlined, and the themes were delineated and treated with more respect in the movie. Max Allan Collin’s script for the comic suffers from not achieving the correct balance between historical fact and fiction, and much of the dialogue is poor. Collins also clearly liked writing extremely absurd John Woo style bloody gunfights, which take up a good portion of the book, detracting from the powerful underlying themes of a strong father-son relationship. Of course, Collins deserves credit for the original concept, which takes the mythic story of the Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub and translates it into the 1930s gangster era. And both Tom Hanks and especially Paul Newman bring a lot more to their characters than can be found in the comic.

But the book is worth getting just for Richard Piers Rayner’s art, incredibly detailed precise line work which took several years to complete. The art evokes lithographic prints, old newspapers, and photographs of the era superbly, and contains great renditions of Eliot Ness, Al Capone, and Frank Viti, as well as stunning cityscapes of old Chicago.

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