Former GTA and RDR writers smash it with new American Caper comic

A lawyer with a huge gambling problem, a mormon hitman, a Wall Street billionaire who's now a cowboy.

No, they don't all walk into a bar together (as far as we know at the moment), but they are just a handful of the undeniably unique and complex characters that star in American Caper.

American Caper is a new crime fiction comic series from Absurd Ventues, a studio co-founded by Dan Houser and Lazlow who worked together at Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption studio Rockstar Games for around 20 years. Houser co-founded Rockstar.

American Caper is set in the fictional town of Verona in the state of Wyoming and is all about people wanting to become heroes who don't know how and the American Dream gone wrong. Having read the first two comics, as you'd imagine from such brilliant minds, it's full of superb satire, tantalising twists at every turn and over-the-top comedic violence.

As Lazlow says, there are also "bad choices, broken people, monetised misery, synthetic sugar, dogs fed donuts, maniacs, shady land developers and grown men aging badly by pretending to be cowboys".

Because - well, why not?

Lazlow spoke to indy100 ahead of the release of American Caper / Supplied

Speaking to indy100 about where the different ideas and themes came from, Lazlow said: "This project started when Dan and I started Absurd Ventures, he said he wanted to tell a different kind of story and make a comic book about it. He had this list of characters and knew he wanted to set it in the Rocky Mountains as that area of America is ripe for story.

"We were talking about how America is a country founded by lawyers for lawyers and you can just see that driving down the street in America, it's all ads for lawyers.

"In the games we've worked on, Dan has come up with these characters that are tragic and flawed and are doing things for the right reasons.

"With some of the most loathsome characters in American Caper, you actually feel some kind of compassion because we show what sent them over the edge. A lot of that in the modern day is the internet, internet rubbish is tearing people apart and about who can shout the loudest. Dan and I love crime drama and there's a family comedy and satire in there too.

"You have so many rich maniacs moving to Wyoming and buying up ranches - there's this resentment of the authentic locals who know how to shoe a horse by these outsiders who move in with tons of money and are playing cowboy.

"Everyone's angry about people who have a better life than you too and that's all Instagram and TikTok do. There's someone I haven't spoken to for 10 years popping up on vacation again. That must be nice. It's just about showing off.

"In American Caper, everyone's miserable and it's everyone else's fault."

Issue one artwork of American Caper. Absurd Ventures

12 issues are planned for the main story arc, with the 12th and final one in the process of being written at the moment. There will be a break before another run if all goes to plan.

At the moment, there seems to be more to satirise in the US than ever before but Lazlow said there's a fine line that has to be considered between producing evergreen satire and reacting to what's happening in real time.

"You have to really be careful when you're working on something like this because we set out the story around 18 months, two years ago and got into the art towards the end of last year - you have to be careful not to respond to the most recent political craziness and change your storyline or put that in," he said.

"There were a couple of small things I added in retrospectively to make sure it still felt relevant but that's the difficulty of satire and storytelling now, there are so many crazy political things happening or huge news stories and you feel like you have to respond to it - but you actually don't. This is a fictional town called Verona which touches on a lot of themes but we're not South Park.

"We've worked hard to make American Caper feel modern but evergreen because modern changes so fast."

Issue one of American Caper is out now. Houser will be signing copies of American Caper and A Better Paradise at the Forbidden Planet London Megastore on 29 November, click here to find out more.

Elsewhere from indy100:

• Former GTA and Red Dead Redemption writers releasing new fictional podcast
• Lazlow on writing Red Dead Redemption 2: "I spent years of my life writing in the 1899 vernacular"

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