"Look, pal, it don't make no difference to me. She paid full price for a body, you understand? She's paying the same for your hand she'd pay for your head. You just relax, do it the easy way. My man Fong's gonna cuff your hand flat to the table, I'm gonna wrap this tourniquet around your arm, find a vein, shoot you up with this happy juice. You go to sleep. You wake up. You got one less hand. All nice and bandaged, better than they'd do it in a hospital."

I hit the switch on the blowtorch. The hissing butane was the loudest sound in the room. I cracked a wooden match into life, fired the torch.

Statute of Limitations ©1992 Andrew Vachss.
© 2000 Andrew Vachss. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

To daytime talk show literati, Andrew Vachss is a familiar face: the guy with the eye-patch on a zealous crusade for children's rights. From federal investigator to social worker to prison director to practising attorney, Vachss has fought for the creation of a federal registry for sex offenders, led a boycott of goods produced in Thailand to protest its child prostitution trade and dedicated his law career exclusively to representing youth.

But Vachss is also a novelist who writes about—you guessed it—"the beast" called child abuse. In Hard Looks, Vachss' previously-released short stories are adapted to the graphic novel—i.e. comic book—format.

Metropolis is a hell-hole and the bad guys aren't just bad—they're pedophiles, rapists and sex-killers. Sometimes there's a hero to save the day, sometimes the hero comes as brutal avenger, as in "Family Resemblance," where a relative of an abducted girl exacts payback on the killers with a sawed-off shot gun.

However, it's stories like "Flash of White," an exploration into the mind of a sex-obsessed stalker who monitors women via telescope that make for Hard Looks' most compelling moments. Vachss leaves the good-bad caricatures and heavy-handed obvious behind, and delivers complex psycho-dramas in the pathological city. Shade that city with some stark, dark illustration and you get a graphic world of hyper-violent, straight-faced adult action closer to Superman than American Splendor. It's just that the bad guys are sick and ugly and sometimes the hero is nowhere to be found.