Daddy Cool
I picked up Daddy Cool at a Goodwill for a buck, because I'm a sucker for cheap comics, and the magazine-sized graphic novels always grab my curiosity. This is an adaptation of the Donald Goines novel of the same name, done by writer Don Glut and artist Alfredo P. Alcala. It falls way short of being good, but I suspect that's due to having to boil an entire novel down to sixty-four pages.
Daddy Cool is Larry Jackson, a hitman working out of Flint, Michigan. He has a wife, daughter, two sons, and a pool hall that makes his hit money seem legit. When a fight with his daughter about her pimp boyfriend causes her to run away, Daddy Cool has to split his time between trying to find her, and completing a hit in Los Angeles. That's telling you exactly what the volume info and issue summary would tell you, because hey, I wrote those too, but the problem is that there's really not a whole lot more to tell.
Glut seems to have managed to fit all of the main story beats into the format, but it's Alcala's art that keeps it going. There's nothing exaggerated in his art. Everything is realistic and proportioned normally. He doesn't hide from the nudity and sex, which keeps it from seeming gratuitous- it's not- it's actually an integral part of the story.
To me, the inside back cover was way more interesting than the story itself (again, I blame the truncated format, rather than the creators). The inside back cover was a brief history on Donald Goines and his novels, including how he and his wife were gunned down in their home in front of their two daughters. It tells how Goines was a drug addict, and used his writing to show an unflinching view of ghetto life and drug addiction.
For the score, I'm giving it one star for making me want to read the novel, one star for the art, and one star for Glut getting as much story as he could into the sixty-four page format. I'm going to take back one star for that style of format-over-storytelling, because it really takes away from what was probably a good story. Final score, two stars.