From Steven Grant’s Permanent Damage column this week:

HARD TIME #2-5 by Steve Gerber, Mary Skrenes & Brian Hurtt, 32 pg color comics ($2.50@)

I still can’t quite warm up to Hurtt’s art, but it has grown more expressive, and the real show here is Gerber & Skrenes’ brutal prison drama/social drama. Teenage co-conspirator in a Columbine-like incident ends up doing 50 years in maximum security, and incessantly finds himself the prey of older, tougher cons while his mother and lawyer try to line up do-gooders to secure his release. The hero’s life is simplified slightly by sympathetic if reticent fellow cons and an ancient, invisible energy being that lives in the hero’s body. In this second series – unfortunately, it’s currently walking its last mile – Gerber & Skrenes shift the battleground a little, moving slowly from questions of mundane evil to cosmic evil, as a serial killer enters the prison population. If anything published by a major company qualifies as a writer’s tour-de-force, this does. Buy it while you still can.

Full disclosure: Grant is a fellow Las Vegan and a friend, but this review was unsolicited and unexpected. Thanks.

(We disagree, though, about Brian Hurtt’s artwork. I think Brian’s moody, yet straightforward approach to the material suited *Hard Time* perfectly.)

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