Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin are a dream team and “Satellite Sam” is their baby. This comic has become a hit and for very good reason. This is retro cool, as in I-can-kick-your-ass-street-smart cool. The salty artist Chaykin has found a writer every bit as salty in Fraction. The first issue made us believe we could travel back to the heyday of early television and live and breathe that time. With this issue, we settle into the story. It will be something that will intrigue and entice.
The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son and so on. That is the case here. Satellite Sam, a goofy matinee idol for television had proven to be too randy and too drunk for his own good. As we learned in the first issue, he was a no show to his own show. One of the staff runs over to his apartment to see if she can get the stray actor back on set to maybe finish up the second act of the live TV broadcast only to find him dead amid a collection of porn. It is left to his son to save the show by taking his father’s role and diving into an improvised script about having found a fountain of youth. It’s so goofy that it makes perfect sense for the show but maybe not so much for the son.
Mike wasn’t exactly cut out to take over his dad’s show and why the hell should he? Father and son are not meant to be lumped together so closely. It’s just not healthy and it can end up being downright creepy. If the father is a jerk, a hack, and an all-around pain in the ass, it’s going to be a horrible burden for the son to step into the old man’s shoes. And there’s a good part of the appeal to this story. We’re going to see poor Mike suffer but it’s going to be very entertaining. Never forget, Carlyle White was murdered. Mike needs to find out who killed his no good dad. And Carlyle hung out with a lot of racy women. Mike needs to talk to these women. Talking can lead to other things. Poor Mike, he is only going to dig himself deeper, and become more a part of, his father’s sins.
Leave it to Matt Fraction to bring to life a world of yesteryear in an honest and unsentimental way. And leave it to Howard Chaykin to take a script and really run with it. His dames are hot and they enjoy getting into trouble.
“Satellite Sam #2” is out as of August 7. Visit our friends at Image Comics.
