Black Cherry

"A lurid tale of sex, violence, and the supernatural."

—From the cover

Black Cherry is a graphic novel by Doug Ten Napel. The story is, initially, a rather simple hardboiled crime plot: Eddie Paretti is your basic mook working for the city's local Mafia don. Our story opens on one fateful night where Eddie's sense of ambition gets the better of him; the head of a rival gang offers him big money in exchange for stealing a body from his boss's mansion.

The job goes farily well, but the aftermath is far more complicated than Eddie could have ever guessed. For one thing, it has brought him back in contact with his old flame, a stripper named Black Cherry. For another, this apparently-simple job has changed the infrastructure of the city's entire criminal underworld. For yet another, Eddie's stunt has inadvertently revealed the existence of extraterrestrial life.

Tropes used in Black Cherry include:

• Abusive Parents: Part of Eddie's not-so-pleasant back story, and it becomes very important at the climax.
• Alien Invasion: Based on various lines of dialogue, it's likely either Type 1 or Type 3.
• Anti-Hero: Eddie is a Type V, though he eventually becomes a Type IV and the ending has him well on the way to moving further up on the ladder.
• Badass in a Nice Suit: About half of the characters. Even Tail does this.
• Badass in Distress
• Big Bad: Tail.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Candle.
• Black Best Friend: Brick
• Cluster F-Bomb: Possibly done to compensate for the fact that the book is extremely coy about female nudity.
  • Doug's foreword also mentions that although religion plays a significant part in the story, many of the characters are scuzzy lowlifes and thus hardly the kind to censor their own language.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Maleficus.
• Dark and Troubled Past
• Darker and Edgier: Compared to almost all of TenNapel's other stuff. As of 2011, the only thing that surpasses it is Gear.
• Deadpan Snarker: Eddie
• Defector From Decadence: Harold Mars.
• Demonic Possession
• Did Not Get the Girl: Twice with the same two characters. The second time was deliberately invoked, however, as a sort of Does Not Want The Girl Yet setup.
• Disappeared Dad: Mary's father. Also, Eddie's father is presumably dead by the time the story begins.
• Expy: Fat Mickey to the Butcher in Creature Tech.
• Eyes Always Shut: Eddie
• Genre Shift
• Gosh Darn It to Heck: Brick, and there's a reason for that.
• Halfway Plot Switch
• Heroic Sacrifice: McHugh and Brick.
• Hybrid Monster
• Hypocritical Humor:

One of Don Mauro's Men (finds a porn mag): Who left this filth here?!
[[[Beat Panel]]]
[Starts reading it.]

• Lady Drunk: Mary's mom.
• Non-Human Sidekick:
  • The Squirrel
  • The Candle, or as Eddie calls him, "Little Candle Buddy".
• Not So Stoic: Eddie.
• Our Angels Are Different
• Our Monsters Are Different
• Private Eye Monologue
• Red Right Hand: Don Mauro's hair sticks up unnaturally when possessed by Tail.
• Scenery Censor: TenNapel just won't take the nudity to Frank Miller levels, although he seems to compensate by making his characters more foul-mouthed than Miller's.
• Secondary Character Title
• The Sixth Ranger: Eddie himself is this, in-universe, to Father McHugh's group.
• The Stoic: Brick.
• Team Dad: Father McHugh.
• Top-Heavy Guy: Eddie.
• Urban Fantasy
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Tail claims to be this, but this is dubious at best. Eddie doesn't care if he's telling the truth one way or the other.

Tail: I just want to save the world.
Eddie (punches him): Here's what good intentions get you!

• X Meets Y: Sin City meets ET the Extraterrestrial meets Reservoir Dogs meets The Exorcist.