Review by Ian Keogh

In the 1940s Tom Greene is an elderly gentleman running a Chicago bar, but when strangers come in asking for the owner he’s canny enough to claim he just works there. He’s well characterised as having the experience of his age, which has softened him around the edges, but sharp enough to see what’s going on around him.

In Europe creators Giancarlo Berardi and Ivo Milazzo are best known for their long-running Western series Ken Parker, their 1970s and 1980s stories still in print, but Tom was a character created beforehand, and one to which they returned after retiring Parker. The result is a really subtle evocation of awareness. This slim collection only supplies four stories, the entire output, but there’s so much humanity. Berardi’s writing is beautifully understated, and Milazzo captures the mood and emotion so well in differently styled art. His opening grey wash approach is stunning, and when he drops the wash to rely on inked lines the delicacy is even more apparent.

The tone is definitively and remarkably established with the opening story ‘Almost Always’, set in the bar the night before the Pearl Harbor attack, a detail that might be missed but for Marko Sunjic’s introduction. A journalist is bemoaning the lack of stories, yet isn’t observant enough to notice what’s going on around him. In addition to the clever plot, it establishes Tom as a man with an unrevealed past still competent enough to maintain his territory.

A more wistful tone characterises the remainder, which deal with a teenager intending to commit a robbery, someone hiding out above the bar, and a heartbreaking glimpse into Tom’s younger days. There’s a nagging feeling of the ending being pulled from another story, but even if it is the case it fits so well here. In all stories Tom has the wisdom of age, able to see what might go wrong, yet aware nothing he says will make any difference and people have to make their own mistakes, even if the outcome could be fatal.

Presented in a nicely designed and reasonably priced hardcover package, the original Italian edition would be five star material. Unfortunately, this isn’t. Igor Maricic is credited for translation, and English obviously isn’t his first language. The English dialogue supplies the essence of what’s happening, but in a constantly strained and awkward way. It’s dialogue for automatons, and is bewildering as publishers Epicenter spend so much time and money getting things right and bringing glorious work to English readers, yet sabotage it right at the end by being too cheap to have a native English speaker polish the dialogue.

This isn’t available via traditional online sources. The publisher sells direct on Ebay.