Interview: Gary Phillips on BOOM!’s The Rinse
The Rinse #1 (cover A)
Gary Phillips is a crime novelist (The Jook, Bangers) and author of the Vertigo’s Angeltown and the upcoming book from Vertigo Crime, Cowboys. Now he comes to BOOM! Studios with The Rinse, a tale of money laundering. Westfield’s Roger Ash contacted Phillips to learn more about the book.
The Rinse preview page 1
Westfield: The Rinse is based on money laundering. What makes that a fertile subject for you?
Gary Phillips: I write crime and mystery stories where handguns, shotguns, knives and sultry dames figure in the equation. Now these elements show up in The Rinse, but this is also a story about how real money, big money, is moved around. Money laundering according to law enforcement and those who study its impact, is a massive underground undertaking where billions are washed worldwide each year. The laundry man’s job is to reduce the bulk – for instance a million in 100 dollar bills weights 22 pounds – and more than anything hide the source of the illicit cash. Laundering isn’t something confined to dingy back rooms where hard looking guys stand around with AKs. Large financial institutions (here’s a recent piece on Wacovia being busted for money laundering) are routinely fined for suspected money laundering, for doing the rinse. The cost of the levy they pay is nothing to what they’ve made on such transactions so that’s just the cost of doing business.
Given all that, I figured, and thankfully the fine folks at BOOM! agreed, what if there was a story involving this aspect of high finance combined with some of these grittier components, the tropes of the crime story, I mentioned? What happens when these two worlds collide? And who’s our main character bridging those arenas?
The Rinse preview page 2
Westfield: Who are some of the main character readers will meet in the series?
Phillips: We have the avuncular Jeff Sinclair. On the surface he’s a mild-mannered money manager with a modest office in San Francisco’s Financial District. A baseball fan, he follows the local team and can be found at the neighborhood watering hole, buying a round or two for friends and acquaintances. But how odd is it that a money manager doesn’t have a computer? Doesn’t seem to keep any kind of file? And what about that prison stint he did where he didn’t betray his friend, as he was betrayed?
Then there’s Della Dash, a hard-charging I.R.S. agent on the trail of $25 mil in unreported monies rumored to have been absconded from the perpetually tanned Steve Maxon, owner of the Paradiso Casino and Resort in Las Vegas. The thieves being Maxon’s wife and another chap, not Jeff. Needless to say, Maxon is not pleased about this, and that his supposed mobbed-up partners can’t find out about funds he was cheating them out of, and sends his representatives on the trail of this money that Jeff is going to rinse. Della and Jeff do a cat-and-mouse tango over what she can and can’t prove as Jeff, who eschews firearms, also tries to stay out of the clutches of Maxon’s two happiness boys, Griff and Graham, and get the job done.
The Rinse preview page 3
Westfield: What can readers look forward to in this series?
Phillips: I hope readers of The Rinse will enjoy it as a crime story with its twists and turns as well as a character study of the principals involved. The editors and I have worked hard to craft situations of the requisite thrills and chills, but also establish a pacing where as the story progresses, we learn more about Jeff Sinclair and what makes him tick.
The Rinse preview page 4
Westfield: Are there any other projects you’re working on that’s you’d like to mention?
Phillips: I’m very pleased that Cowboys, an original graphic novel, is out soon from the now sadly cancelled Vertigo crime line imprint (a link to an interview about it on CBR). I’m continuing to write the 1930s era adventures of super spy Operator 5 for Moonstone in comics and prose, and proud to have contributed Enforcer No. 3 (I guess I’m on a numbers kick) for Shaken: Stories for Japan, an e-book only anthology for Japan quake and tsunami relief.
The Rinse #1 (cover B)
Westfield: Any closing comments?
Phillips: Issue #1 of The Rinse is a mere $1.99 introductory price of action and insight highlighting the masterful art of Marc Laming… how can you go wrong?
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March 20th, 2012 at 7:33 am
[...] the four issue comic book mini-series from Boom about a money launderer named Jeff Sinclair in The Rinse. In the past, the laundryman was that shady lawyer or pawnbroker in the green eyeshade in those [...]