Review by Ian Keogh

After a long car chase Jacques Ramirez, definite award-winning vacuum cleaner company employee and possible feared assassin, was surprised at the end of Act One by the appearance of an old acquaintance. The opening pages of Act Two dip back into the past, clarify some relationships, and explain a little more of the background to Nicolas Petrimaux’s stunning homage to action movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The good news is that it’s more of the same from Petrimaux, with great attention paid to detail artistically and via the inclusion of hilarious ad and magazine pastiches. You can skip them if you want, but they’re funny and add some further information to a world where the launch of a new vacuum cleaner is a newsworthy event.

He may once have been Mexico’s most feared hitman, but in 1987 Ramirez is more reactive than proactive, keeping his head down as things blow up around him. It helps that he’s fallen in with movie star turned bank robber Chelsea Tyler, and his ultimate aim is to get to a festival where his dead wife’s bandmates are headlining. As before, numerous complications stand in his way, and he seems unusually protective of the prototype vacuum cleaner he’s carrying.

Petrimaux’s methods are cinematic throughout, with carefully considered switches between scenes and locations, some finely tuned dialogue and a good range of characters, ranging from the hilarious to the psychotic. Ramirez’s company manager exemplifies the care taken with the cast. His is just a supporting role barely necessary to the ongoing plot, and he’s a dull non-entity completely unable to see the bigger picture, yet his interview with an increasingly frustrated police detective is comedy gold. The cinematic influence is most evident in the art, though, with each panel treated as it’s own movie freeze frame, packed with detail and personality. There’s not a single point where Petrimaux can’t be bothered, a lesson many comic artists could take on board. As an example of the care taken, some conversations are complex, and to show every person talking would slow the pace, so Petrimaux supplies little portraits in the speech balloons.

For all the fine technique, though, there’s no losing sight of this as an action thriller, and Gunning for Ramirez really delivers on that score, with amazingly well choreographed set pieces. It was going to be difficult living up to Act One, but the quality is sustained. Can the finale in Act Three improve on near perfection?