Normandy Gold

This graphic novel puts a heavy emphasis on the graphic as it swaggers through a self-conscious 1970s sexploitation plot. Normandy Gold, a leggy lawwoman from the wrong side of the tracks, dresses in the greatest fashion hits of the ’70s and settles arguments with an enormous knife. When her sister, a troubled call girl, disappears, Normandy goes undercover in the sex industry to find out what happened. These pages are dripping with gold chains, cocaine, rattan chairs, and male chauvinism, not to mention characters with big mustaches saying things like, “Johnny Deeper never holds out, baby. That ain’t my scene.” When the artists aren’t showing off Normandy’s fabulous, funky clothes, they’re filling the pages with grindhouse-style sex and violence. As the “Fantasy Casting” postscript lays out, almost all the characters are based on movie actors (though it might have been more thematically consistent if they were uniformly actors from the period; Mark Ruffalo is gratuitously thrown in). The B-movie pastiche is almost too perfect, capturing but never rising above the clichés of the genre. It’s a cheesy potboiler, even if the sheen is ladled on to an even more absurd degree than in a real period artifact. (Apr.)