Comic Review By Jair! Books Releasing the Week of 08/26/2026!

Comics Review By Jair!

Hammerfist #1

This book hits as hard as the title implies!

Mike is a down-on-his-luck killer for hire. Not the professional kind like Leon, but a bargain-bin murderer barely scraping by and taking any job that’ll keep gas in his truck and drugs in his system. His world is dirty, rife with an unwashable layer of grime that only a lifetime of failures and felonies can accrue. His daily routine is as depressing as it is degenerate. Murder, smoke, repeat,  a simple, vicious cycle that has isolated him from everyone he ever cared about. To top it all off, he’s a hitman who doesn’t even make enough from killing to take care of his estranged daughter, that is until two mysterious strangers approach him with an offer that's too good to refuse.

One bank job and $400,000 in cash. The kind of money that means his daughter will never go without again. The kind of money that’ll let Mike stop living out of his pickup truck and maybe get out of the po-dunk town that most folks desperately want to escape from. So, of course, Mike takes the job, and of course, it’s too good to be true. What happens next is far weirder than any bank job gone wrong you’ve seen and may well lead Mike into a world he never imagined.

Rick Remender (Deadly Class, Black Science, Tokyo Ghost) has crafted a gritty pulp crime world as filthy as it is action-packed. It’s grindhouse meets supernatural, brought to life by the incredibly talented artist Steve Epting and colorist Matt Hollingsworth. From the first pages, you’re immersed in this world. Hollingsworth’s red-heavy, muted color palette creates an air of menacing unease. The world is cloaked in shadows, true to noir aesthetics, but characters are still rendered clearly, the artwork is crisp and environments never look muddy. Remender’s dialogue flows effortlessly, imbuing each character with their own personality and making it apparent that the cast is all pretty bad people. Mike is not someone you’ll necessarily root for, but he has a code, nihilist as it may be, and a simple/relatable motivation: “take care of my kid.” The result is a character that feels refreshingly unpredictable, and I can’t wait to see how he navigates the circumstance he’s been thrown into.

If you like grindhouse, crime noir or stories about bad men trying to do the right thing, this book is for you. It’s a blockbuster crime story told with the depth of an indie drama and it is the most exciting book I’ve read in a hot minute. Remender may well have another hit on his hands. Add Hammerfist to your pull list ASAP,  you won’t regret it!

 

My name is Jair Tolliver.

I've worked at Dr No's for just less than a year and I've been patronizing them for half my life. I like comics, video games, music and sometimes sports.

I’m a GSU graduate, veteran sandwich artist, and aspiring writer. Ask me about the X-Men or my anime car sometime.

I think all comics are good they're human expression, dreams put to a page through days, months and years of dedication. They're windows into other worlds, aspirations of all we can be, warnings of what we may become and everything in between. Above all I think comics can help us understand the things we often don't consider.

That's what I want these reviews to do, help folks understand maybe even appreciate something they haven't seen before, but yea lemme wrap this up I got books to file. Happy reading!