Page 45 Review by Jonathan
"BRIGGS! You got a visitor. Fifteen minutes, Jim."
"So what the fuck happened to yesterday?"
"I got busy."
"I needed you here yesterday. We have a schedule for a reason, Grace. It's like this: you come visit me and I give you orders. Now, if that's suddenly becoming difficult for you to understand, well... forgive me if I'm not sympathetic to you and your frivolous life. What the fuck do you do all day, anyway?"
"Jim, please..."
"Shut up. I run this family. Me, not you. I know it. You know it. Our boys know it. And everyone else we know knows it. And if you are ever late coming here again..."
"STOP IT! This is the last time I'm coming here. I'm telling you this face to face as a courtesy. We're over. I'm taking over control of the family."
"Yeah, right. Over my dead body you are. What the hell's gotten into you?"
"I know about your negotiations with the Albany County D.A.'s office. How's that for starters? I put a thousand dollars in your commissary account. Consider it severance pay. I suggest you make it last. Don't underestimate me on this. I'm no sellout. I'm prepared to do whatever it takes to protect our land and our history. I've been a Briggs since I was seventeen years old. I've gotten pretty good at it."
And that, as they say, is where we come in. It'll not surprise you to learn that incarcerated antigovernment secessionist and local white power hoodlum Jim Briggs is not best impressed with his wife Grace's attempt at a de facto coup. Quite how their three sons, all very different characters, each with their own agendas and differing degrees of filial piety (plus the rest of the rank and file shock troops running protection rackets and goodness knows what else throughout the county) will react, remains to be seen.
It's an absolute certainty Jim isn't going to just sit back in his prison cell and take it, though, that is for sure. But being stuck inside serving a full life term for an assassination attempt on the President of the United States might make his control on the clan more than a little shaky, especially given Grace's inside knowledge of his recent attempts to cut a deal with the authorities, potentially for lucrative fracking and real estate rights to their hundred square miles of rural wilderness. And presumably some reduction of Jim's sentence...
Sell out indeed, or perhaps buy out might be more appropriate depending on your point of view. If it's one facing certain death behind bars gradually decaying in a tiny cell, well, it can give even a hardcore anti-establishment man a different perspective on the benefits of the grand old political system and the peoples' representatives' fondness for a spot of chicanery.
Brian MASSIVE / DEMO / DMZ / LOCAL / STARVE / NORTHLANDERS / BLACK ROAD / NEW YORK FOUR Wood (he's written a lot of great comics!!) has come up with another belter of a premise for us here, fleshing out the rest of the opening pages by giving us the lowdown on Mama Briggs and her brood, as seen through the eyes of the pair of romantically involved FBI agents on undercover surveillance duties, who are just as intrigued as everyone else by the power grab and how raucously it'll play out.
We don't have long to wait on that score as Wood fires off the first round of gunfire and high explosives that I'm sure will become an ever-present punctuation on this title. As far as warning shots go, it's a pretty full-on scorcher right through the bows, never mind across them, incendiary one for Grace, but given she was expecting it, she doesn't seem the slightest bit phased. I dare say she'd almost have felt disrespected if it hadn't been forthcoming... The question now, is precisely how does she respond?
I wasn't aware of artist Mick Chater before, but it's damn fine minimal artwork, I have to say, very similar to Butch ARCHANGEL Guice. This is certainly going to appeal massively to fans of SOUTHERN BASTARDS and SCALPED, plus the Justified and Sons Of Anarchy television shows. In fact, Briggs Land is apparently already in development for an AMC TV show, which doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
