Bill Willingham’s stock in trade can best be described as “taking deep questions for stoners and trying to do interesting things with them”. With Fables, it was “What if fairy tales were real?” With The Elementals, it was “What if superheroes were jerks?” And with Proposition Player, it’s “What if that old bar gag about selling your soul for a beer were actually real?”
Joey’s a “proposition player”, a low-rent poker pro who gets paid to fill an empty seat at a bad table in a low-end casino. He’s got a sort-of girlfriend who works there, dreams of making it big, and the sort of personality that practically demands somebody punch him every time he opens his mouth. After work one day, he pulls the old “I’ll buy your soul from you” shtick on his coworkers at the casino, and things get interesting.
Interesting in the sense that it works, that is. Joey gets his hands on a small pile of souls, which gets both Heaven and Hell interested via their respective agents. Meanwhile, old pagan gods who’ve fallen out of the soul-collecting business sense an opportunity, slap on Hawaiian shirts, and take a gander at what’s suddenly going on in Vegas.
All of this is more than a little reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, albeit with more snark and less subtlety. The angels in charge of getting Joey’s souls away from him don’t do a very good job of it, alternately ineffectual and brutal in turn. The representative from the other side, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be trying too hard, either, though she does show up in a variety of skimpy outfits. Ultimately, the graphic novel devolves into a series of unsubtle straw men about religion that Willingham sets up and then gleefully torches. The book never rises above the level of the sort of philosophical debate that you get when you’ve stayed too late at the party, which is sad; Willingham was handling matters of theology with more skill and creativity twenty years ago when he confronted The Elementals’ Tommy Czuchra with the knowledge that Thor had sided with the Nazis.
The art, penciled by Willingham and Paul Guinan and inked by Ron Randall, matches the storytelling, which is to say it’s broad and in places lumpy, and the proportions on the characters keep changing. While the character design is interesting – angels aren’t usually portrayed as a cross between a troll and Biff from Back to the Future – mostly they’re just incongruous, and occasionally they’re distracting.
In the end, there’s just not enough to Proposition Player to justify its premise. Readers jonesing for something in the vein of Season of Mists might find it an interesting stopgap, but it doesn’t really stand up to either Neil Gaiman’s work or the best of Bill Willingham’s own.
(Vertigo, 2003)
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