I cried when Brandon Lee died. I can still remember being a young kid still reeling from watching “The Crow” a week before and suddenly watching a news report about the death of Lee. Is that a bit over the top? I don’t know, I can’t say. I don’t think it was an irrational response, to be honest. In that age I was impressionable and very passionate about movies and I was becoming a huge fan of Lee. I’d seen “Rapid Fire” and “Showdown” a million times and he’d convinced me he was worth following in “The Crow.” I mean what’s so wrong with mourning someone you admired? People cried when Lennon died. People cried when JFK died. People cried when John Wayne died. Hell people cried when Bruce Lee died. So I don’t honestly think my reaction to Lee’s death was unreasonable. Because this man had every single aspect that showed he was capable of becoming a humongous star. And whether he became the neo-Bruce Lee or just faded in to obscurity, it didn’t matter. “The Crow” encapsulates everything that was amazing about Brandon, and if he moved on to doing nothing but cheap action movies, “The Crow” would have stood as his ultimate.
I mean when you get down to the nitty gritty, “The Crow” is not just a movie based on a comic. It has a meaning, it has a message. Take the moment where Draven is battling Tin Tin in the alleyway. He beats him, humiliates him, and submits him to punishment and then basically tears him down. Tin Tin who boasts about the ease of murder declares that he never misses with his throwing knives and is forced to watch as he misses while throwing a knife at Draven, then has to watch another knife be bounced away, and then Draven proceeds in catching his third knife in mid air and darting it back at him showing that HIS licks never miss. Then he mutters “Victims. Aren’t we all?” before driving his knife in to his chest. That’s not just a clever one-liner meant to be chuckled at as if Ahnold was saying it while blowing up a helicopter with a bazooka. It has a definition.
What Draven is basically saying is “Don’t kid yourself, no one is untouchable. You’re about to die like I did.” And Tin Tin is brought down like a sick dog as he should have been a long time ago. Draven has basically shown every single villain in the story that they’re not immortal and that they’re going to be destroyed even if a spiritual guide has to intervene and show him the way to them. It’s effectively a message to every bit of evil in this world that says “Sooner or later, you’re going to get yours. So don’t get comfortable.” Naive? Probably, but if it manages to inspire some sense of hope, then it’s not entirely in vain.
Every single evil persona in this film looks upon themselves as gods. Top Dollar and Myca hide in their ivory tower doing whatever they want guarded by the protective Grange while T-Bird and his crew come and go as they please even going so far as to swallow bullets as an attempt to display their invincibility. Draven knocks them down completely. Gods being broken by a nobody is the sickest way to wreak payback, almost like Prometheus stealing the fire from Zeus. Take for example the scene where Myca declares “I like the Pretty Lights” causing a raucous laugh from the gangsters in the board meeting. This was a clear indication that by this moment Draven had sapped their power and sense of self-worth and they’d now been reduced to equals among their peers. In spite of their posturing, Draven and the Crow took away their power inch by inch which is why Myca takes that last desperate reach for power by kidnapping the wounded crow.
I didn’t think it was possible but the graphic novel of “The Crow” is bleaker and grimmer than the movie.
Throughout the entire first half of the novel I found myself rather thrown for a loop not just because the entire order of the way the villains die differs, but because O’Barr takes great pains in bringing this story down to the murky depths that constantly walks the line of horror and fantasy. Eric Draven is a horrifying character, one who doesn’t mind mutilating anyone who gets in his way. And of course the way he and Shelly die is brutally heartbreaking. O’Barr allows us a better look in to their lives than the movie does and we get to see the true extent of the passion between Eric and Shelly including a touching moment where he surprises her with a ring which prompts her to jump on him and boast about the ring while Eric is covered in spilled paint. It’s a truly emotional graphic novel.
All of my life I’ve heard about this series and never had the chance to buy it because it’s almost impossible to find around where I live. Finally I was able to acquire it for the purposes of this article and much like the film, it’s an emotional piece of art for O’Barr that is preceded by an introduction from his friend John Bergin who attempts to break down all of the pre-conceived notions O’Barr has built about the source of the creation for this graphic novel. He insists that while O’Barr explains it’s just a product of his love for bands like the Cure and Joy Division, in actuality what he doesn’t often tell people is that this is something from the depths of his soul.
This artistic masterpiece is something that was created as if to cope with a horrific loss in his life. And though he never tells people what it was that this was used to cope for, that he knows quite well and that this is a form of coping that he as an artist concocted to move on with his life and use as a living tribute. And how can you not believe him when you see pages like the one in number 123 where Draven sits in his abandoned apartment talking to god asking “How could you make something so soft and innocent and beautiful and just destroy it? God. You Bastard.”
These aren’t the words of a person whose drawn his influences from a rock band, this is clearly the words of a man who has experienced an immense loss and every bit of his soul is poured in to every page. People who have had a great life can not write words as powerful as O’Barr did. Which makes “The Crow” much more than a graphic novel in the end. The deaths of Shelly and Eric are much more graphic and horrific than the ones we see in the film. Most of both deaths are cut away from and implied but the deaths in the graphic novel are heart wrenching simply because O’Barr provides a lengthy preamble that gives us an insight in to Shelly and Eric’s relationship. Like the film they were just two average people so madly in love and Eric was just some random victim of a brutal crime who could do nothing to help his wife.