Okay, so I had wondered if we'd get some back story on the odd mask (which many letter-writers do not like) that Sable wears, because it scares the bad guys. In the wake of his family's murder and the burning of his house, this bad ass hunter scrawls the mask on his face with the ashes of his old life and then sets out into the Rhodesian wilds to hunt and kill the men responsible. And boy does he.
This series is very violent. There's a difference between the stylized violence we see in superhero comics and the more realistic violence we see in a series like this one. In a lot of ways, I see Sable and its indie ilk as precursors of a sort to the rampant violence that takes over superhero comics in the early 90s. A character like Sable is explicitly defined as "cool," a suave, skilled anti-hero who isn't afraid to kill. The moral boundaries of heroism are tested in such a story. And while I agree that there is space for stories like this in the medium, we have to be wary of them not taking over the whole industry as they seemed to during the Image boom. A lot of good may have come out of that experiment, but, as my revamping of my storage system has made quite clear, a lot of bad came out of it too.
More of Sable's story to follow.
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