Ghouls Just Wanna Have Fun: Reviewing ‘Freddie The Fix’ One-Shot

Hollywood has always had a dark underbelly. A shining town full of dreams, but scratch the surface and beneath the shallow veneer are the stuff of nightmares Writer Garth Ennis and artist Mike Perkins take this metaphorical allusion and make it a reality in Freddie the Fix one-shot from Image Comics. Imagine real-life, scandalous crimes, but perpetrated by B-movie ghouls. Werewolves, vampires, shape-shifters and more, who all rely on the services of Freddie to clean up and cover up their sins. And a man with connections. Think Hollywood Babylon meets the Universal Pictures’ Monsters with a Chinatown vibe.

In the opening establishing scene — in which Freddie covers up the death of an innocent, ripped apart by a werewolf in the throws of sexual ecstasy —  we soon discover Freddie is a well-established and much relied-upon fixer for Hollywoood’s monsters with some helpful acquaintances and contacts made along the way. All of these help him slip into Hollywood’s more lurid hangouts, as he is tasked with a bizarre case. Not a murder mystery as such, but rather the job of ensuring the would-be murder victim is dead. And stays dead. 

Ennis, as ever, provides the laughs, the coarse language and the clever script, but it’s artist Mike Perkins involvement and his level of attention to detail and realism he always brings to his art that helps elevate this comic to something more than just another funny horror book. The artwork almost acts as the straight man to Ennis’s joker. The realism gives this one-shot an air of the neon-noir and a tone of impending peril, which Freddie always seems to effortlessly sidestep. His observations on Hollywood as depicted in his artwork takes a fantastical conceit and grounds it; making it believable. This neon-nor mise-en-scene is further solidified by the colour art of Mike Spicer, who brings the brightness of Hollywood to the page, but also the darker underside we so often visit as Freddie knocks on doors and we meet even more of the stranger things that plough their trade in Hollywood.

As a primer for a potential series, this works perfectly. We get a fascinating cast of B-Movie monsters of all shapes, sizes and sexual predilections (another Ennis trope alive and kicking in this one-shot) and plenty of dark humour and darker crimes. On the evidence of this one-shot alone, I’d certainly like to see more of Freddie and his fixing and ore of the colourful cast Ennis and Perkins have introduced readers to in here.

Freddie The Fix #1 is out now from Image Comics