As though to say, “Look what happened! And it happened to people!” A conjuror, able to mimic the styles of blending the noirish balance of light and shadow to his will, and a master of characterization and the subtle, humanizing detail, Phillips can nonetheless turn on a dime and deliver stunning, blazing scenes of action and violence. But as great as his vision is, it’s Sean Phillips powerful, nuanced artwork that brings it all home.

Sure, most of you crime writers out there ought to thank your lucky stars Brubaker’s sticking to the funny pages. These are stories of hard luck, bad luck and no luck at all punch-in-the-gut betrayals and catch-in-your-throat loyalty cowardice and courage, stories that will make you despair and stories that’ll make you want to shoot out the lights.īut it’s not just the writing by Brubaker. There have been stories so bleak and black you may be left thinking there’s no light left in the world at all, and stories that will just shatter the heart of anyone who still has a working model. These two comic geeks have nabbed every comics award around, and with the nervy, twitchy, always ambitious Criminalhave continued to push the crime comic genre in directions nobody expected, exploring, twisting, reshaping and exploding every god damn pulp, hard-boiled and noir trope they could get their hands on along the way. Tree, although not an anthology, was was no slouch when it came to ballsy ambitioun), but Brubaker and Phillips’ Criminalis something else again, a seemingly perfect blend of text and art. There have been other crime comic anthologies before, of course, and some have even tried to place them in a similar, loosely connected universe (David Lapham’s amazing Stray Bullets immediately comes to mind, and Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty’s Ms. Not really.Ĭriminalbegan in October 2006, initially published by Marvel’s Icon imprint, and followed the crimes (successful and otherwise) and misadventures of a loosely connected assortment of thieves, pickpockets, enforcers, army deserters, mobsters, cops, victims, junkies, innocent and not-so-innocent bystanders, cons and ex-cons and various members of the appropriately named Lawless family. The action skips back and forth in time, and is mostly based in the fictitious Center City, although these miscreants certainly seem to get around.Ībout the only thing they’ve left out, really, is private eyes, and I’m pleased to report that they’ve finally rectified that glaring omission, with the introduction, at least for a while, of hapless Dan Farraday, into the Criminal universe in the June 2019 issue of the new monthly series by Image. No, the long-running, Eisner-winning CRIMINAL comic book series, written by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, isn’t a P.I.

Criminal ed brubaker sean phillips