Spanish cartoonist Marti's The Cabbie spins off MartinScorsese's sordid urban-justice drama, Taxi Driver , with a graphicstyle that unapologetically appropriates and even refines the brutal slabs ofblack, squashed perspectives, and grotesque approach to human physiognomy (andits ability to withstand punishment) that define Chester Gould's DickTracy daily comic strip. And as Art Spiegelman (who was the first to publishMarti's work in English, in RAW magazine) notes in his introduction,while "Gould's graphic black and white precision and hisdiagrammatic clarity live on in Marti's work" -- "moreinterestingly, perhaps, so does Gould's depravity." Indeed, ifanything, The Cabbie is even more savage than the legendarily brutal Dick Tracy , with its pimps, whores, petty thieves, corrupt businessmen,all swirling around the ingenuously violent "Cabbie" whoseself-administered "upstanding citizen" status entitles him --in his view -- to even more shocking acts of violence -- especially onhis quest for the stolen coffin of his father, which he's told includeshis entire inheritance!
