Hard Time by Steve Gerber

Since I began this new feature that looks at some of my favorite comic books ever with a pretty standard entry from the most mainstream of all possible comics (Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man), I figured I’d move from the accessible to the obscure. And out of print. In 2004, Steve Gerber (best known for his work on Howard the Duck) and Mary Skrenes (who created Omega the Unknown with Gerber for Marvel) put out this new book on the DC Focus imprint (kind of like Vertigo, but with a “focus” on super-powered characters who didn’t wear costumes). The story was about a kid, Ethan Harrow, who plays a trenchcoat mafia style “joke” on some bullying jocks at his school. During the course of it, Ethan’s “powers” manifest for the first time, and several boys are killed. Ethan goes to prison to do, you guessed it, hard time. While locked up, Ethan begins to develop his strange powers, all the while dealing with the typical prison problems of gangs and violence. To Gerber’s credit, he writes about all the tropes you’d expect to see: Nazis, Mexican gangbangers, the Black Mafia, homosexual prison “wives”…But none of the characters are simplistic. All have depth. Hard Time is an example of character-b...