I.R.$: Taxing Trails

Writer: Dresberg
Illustrator: Vrancken
Translator: Luke Spear
Publisher: Cinebook

Before I start the review I just want to apologise as I am not 100% sure where I.R.$ was originally published. I believe it was originally published in Brussels but I'm not totally sure that is correct.

Now that's out the way I can move on to my review of I.R.$: Taxing Trails. Last year at the Birmingham Comic Show there was a stand for Cinebook,The 9th Art Publishers and what caught my eye with this stand was that they were selling English translations of European comics. This interested me a lot because for the past few years I had read and heard that a lot of the comic material coming out of Europe was far superior to that which was coming out of the USA and the UK.
So obviously I was interested in being able to check out some of this material first hand. Prior to this the only experience I had with European comics was reading/looking at old Tin-Tin and Asterix books in the Library when I was a kid and in more recent times I had the opportunity to read Blacksad Volume 2: Arctic Nation, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Luckily for me Cinebook's was doing a 3 for 2 on book deals so I was able to get a few titles. The first of these that I have read is I.R.$: Taxing Trails.

Ill be honest here and say that I only picked up the book because of its cover, as I thought it looked quite interesting that the I.R.S would have a special agent with a gun working for them. I really did wonder how they would explain it!

I.R.$: Taxing Trails is collection of 2 stories that follow the missions of Larry B. Max who works as a special agent for the I.R.S. Essentially he is a hardcore accountant version of James Bond. The story follows Larry as he investigates the the murder of an important Swiss citizen who has been assassinated and this leads to the trail of a Jewish-American business man, who it seems has amassed a rather large amount money from his deceased relatives from World War 2. Soon enough Larry discovers there is more to this case than what he originally thought.
Also as a side line through out the book we see Larry start a relationship with a call girl called Gloria,who we never really see but Larry uses her to get answers that he need another perspective on.

I really did not know what to expect with this book as I had never read anything like this before.At first whilst reading it there were a lot facts and figures used in the first part of the book and that made me a bit dubious as to how much I would enjoy it, only because I was worried that if these figures were important that I would forget them or not see their relevance due to my dyslexia. Luckily enough though I was proven wrong and as the story got more involved and developed, I was able to follow the story with ease and enjoyed it throughly. One negative point about the book I would have to add is in the first chapter when Larry is having a gun battle with a hit-woman, there is some awfully tacky dialogue used, although this made me laugh/groan out loud, it really did not distract me from the story.
I really enjoyed the story and I am interested to check up on the future volumes of I.R.$., So I think ill be picking it up very soon. The best way I could describe this book would be a comic book film noir. The book has femme fatals, deception and a protagonist who will stop at nothing to achieve his desired outcome.

The artwork in the book is amazingly detailed and the colours are incredibly vivid. At first I did think the faces looked a little bland but as I read more I found the faces of the characters more detailed and they appeared to display emotion a lot more too. The scenes that I thought looked truly amazing, were the flash-backs to World War 2 and pages that showed Larry talking to Gloria, the call girl. The artwork is really crisp and a pleasure to look at and at times reminds me of the detail that Jean Giraud(Moebius) would put into his work. Although I should point out I am in no way in expert in this subject.
A great book and an interesting new character for me to follow. If you are a fan of Film-Noir it might be worth checking this book out.