Stephanie Kay
Oct 13, 2007, 10:31 pm
<a href="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/4images/details.php?image_id=10173" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.comixfan.com/xfan/images/covers/marvel/criminal02t.jpg" hspace=10 align=left alt="Criminal #2"></a>Reviewer: Kerry Birmingham, birmy@juno.com
Story Title: “Coward, Part Two of Five”
OUT OF GAS PLEASE DON’T TOW
Story by: Ed Brubaker
Art by: Sean Phillips
Colors by: Val Staples
Published by: Marvel Comics (http://www.marvel.com/)
Is there a finer writer-artist team working in comics today than Brubaker-Phillips? The point’s obviously debatable, but it’s hard to deny that these are two craftsmen who work well together. Brubaker’s been getting a lot of attention lately, with his deservedly-lauded Captain America stories and his divisive recent work Uncanny X-Men (in all fairness, a book where every writer’s turn is divisive). Phillips, meanwhile, an old pro who’s been producing moody, evocative work for years with little fan recognition, seems to have inadvertently stumbled into mainstream comics consciousness in the wake of Marvel Zombies.
So high profile are these works that the solicitation copy cites them as selling points for Criminal, but anybody who’s been paying attention knows that it all goes back to Sleeper, Brubaker and Phillips’ previous collaboration. Sleeper never set sales records in its brief run at DC/Wildstorm, but it won a lot of accolades and some devoted fans with its unique approach to the capes-and-spandex genre, best described as “superhero noir.” In a lot of ways, Sleeper was a dry run for Criminal. Add some powers and some spy tech and there’s not a whole lot to distinguish the world of Criminal from the world of Sleeper. Which is good.
Criminal is, wholly and admittedly, a genre exercise on the creators’ parts; a serialized heist film, a pulp noir all in color for $2.99. It may have ditched the flimsy heroes-and-villains dynamics of Sleeper, but it’s otherwise all there: an anti-hero down on his luck doing what he can to survive, a liar and a cheater hoping not to get lied to and cheated.
This time it’s Leo, a small-time crook known more for his failures than his successes. He’s been recruited by an inside man to pull of a brazen daylight robbery of an armored car. There’s a lot at stake, not the least of which are Leo’s increasingly senile mentor in crime and– this being comic noir– a woman to whom he just can’t say no.
Things move surprisingly quickly in this second chapter of five, as we move from stakeout to plan to heist within the space of twenty-two pages. Like virtually all heist stories in all of fiction, things don’t go exactly as planned, and it makes for an explosive finale to the issue. Brubaker, interestingly, does not save the heist for a late-chapter climax; it happens here, somewhat abruptly to a reader used to elaborate set-up in heist stories, and it suddenly makes things even more interesting. Status quos are shaken, lives are at stake; the outcome isn’t exactly unpredictable but it still comes across as surprising. It’s startling enough to make the reader wonder where it’s going but well within the boundaries of a plot that includes faux eplieptics, car chases, and cops on the take.
One gets the impression from Criminal that Brubaker isn’t just writing homage, he’s carefully crafting his story within the confines of the genre. There’s a fair amount of obvious tribute to the story’s genre forebears, and Brubaker works over the noir clichés like a P.I. works over a hood for information. Like Sleeper’s protagonist Holden Carver, Leo is a mixture of the pathetic and the sympathetic, just identifiable enough for the reader to care about Leo and the people he cares about. The story loses nothing moving from tough-guy talk (“Seymour may say you’re in charge here... but I found this job... I call my own shots!”) to wistful sentimentality (“Those little sparks of who he used to be make all the difference...”) within the space of a few pages. A nice touch is the recurrence of “Frank Kafka, Private Eye,” the comic-within-the-comic that seems to be being set up as a through-line for the series’ future story arcs (apparently self-contained, which leaves Leo’s fate even more up in the air).
Phillips’s pencils are, as always, top-notch. Phillips excels at panel-to-panel storytelling and has a distinctive style – all pools of black and subtle emotions set off by a single line– that fits the proceedings perfectly; this is not a story whose mood would be improved by, say, Ed McGuinness.
Even the packaging is nice to look at: it’s a well designed comic, from the large logo on the wraparound cover painting to the Fell-style back matter at the end of the book, this issue offering a few early letters and an essay by Brubaker on the 1947 film Out of the Past. If there’s any indication that this book, from Marvel’s creator-owned “Icon” imprint, isn’t a typical Marvel book, it’s that there’s ads for competitors’ books in the back. Classy.
It seems woefully obvious that crime stories occupy little space in the modern comic landscape– Sleeper, as much love as its gotten here and elsewhere, was never a best-seller, and that had superhero trappings to sell it. Criminal is a similar aberration, Sleeper evolved: a pulp throwback that celebrates its genre without sacrificing any of the pathos and grit. It’s worth reading, and thus far a worthy addition to the growing canon of work from the writer of Captain America and Uncanny X-Men and the artist of Marvel Zombies.
RATING:
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Want a REAL steal? BUY this issue at X-WORLD and SAVE! (http://x-worldcomics.com/yourvirtualstore/shopexd.asp?id=21291)
Story Title: “Coward, Part Two of Five”
OUT OF GAS PLEASE DON’T TOW
Story by: Ed Brubaker
Art by: Sean Phillips
Colors by: Val Staples
Published by: Marvel Comics (http://www.marvel.com/)
Is there a finer writer-artist team working in comics today than Brubaker-Phillips? The point’s obviously debatable, but it’s hard to deny that these are two craftsmen who work well together. Brubaker’s been getting a lot of attention lately, with his deservedly-lauded Captain America stories and his divisive recent work Uncanny X-Men (in all fairness, a book where every writer’s turn is divisive). Phillips, meanwhile, an old pro who’s been producing moody, evocative work for years with little fan recognition, seems to have inadvertently stumbled into mainstream comics consciousness in the wake of Marvel Zombies.
So high profile are these works that the solicitation copy cites them as selling points for Criminal, but anybody who’s been paying attention knows that it all goes back to Sleeper, Brubaker and Phillips’ previous collaboration. Sleeper never set sales records in its brief run at DC/Wildstorm, but it won a lot of accolades and some devoted fans with its unique approach to the capes-and-spandex genre, best described as “superhero noir.” In a lot of ways, Sleeper was a dry run for Criminal. Add some powers and some spy tech and there’s not a whole lot to distinguish the world of Criminal from the world of Sleeper. Which is good.
Criminal is, wholly and admittedly, a genre exercise on the creators’ parts; a serialized heist film, a pulp noir all in color for $2.99. It may have ditched the flimsy heroes-and-villains dynamics of Sleeper, but it’s otherwise all there: an anti-hero down on his luck doing what he can to survive, a liar and a cheater hoping not to get lied to and cheated.
This time it’s Leo, a small-time crook known more for his failures than his successes. He’s been recruited by an inside man to pull of a brazen daylight robbery of an armored car. There’s a lot at stake, not the least of which are Leo’s increasingly senile mentor in crime and– this being comic noir– a woman to whom he just can’t say no.
Things move surprisingly quickly in this second chapter of five, as we move from stakeout to plan to heist within the space of twenty-two pages. Like virtually all heist stories in all of fiction, things don’t go exactly as planned, and it makes for an explosive finale to the issue. Brubaker, interestingly, does not save the heist for a late-chapter climax; it happens here, somewhat abruptly to a reader used to elaborate set-up in heist stories, and it suddenly makes things even more interesting. Status quos are shaken, lives are at stake; the outcome isn’t exactly unpredictable but it still comes across as surprising. It’s startling enough to make the reader wonder where it’s going but well within the boundaries of a plot that includes faux eplieptics, car chases, and cops on the take.
One gets the impression from Criminal that Brubaker isn’t just writing homage, he’s carefully crafting his story within the confines of the genre. There’s a fair amount of obvious tribute to the story’s genre forebears, and Brubaker works over the noir clichés like a P.I. works over a hood for information. Like Sleeper’s protagonist Holden Carver, Leo is a mixture of the pathetic and the sympathetic, just identifiable enough for the reader to care about Leo and the people he cares about. The story loses nothing moving from tough-guy talk (“Seymour may say you’re in charge here... but I found this job... I call my own shots!”) to wistful sentimentality (“Those little sparks of who he used to be make all the difference...”) within the space of a few pages. A nice touch is the recurrence of “Frank Kafka, Private Eye,” the comic-within-the-comic that seems to be being set up as a through-line for the series’ future story arcs (apparently self-contained, which leaves Leo’s fate even more up in the air).
Phillips’s pencils are, as always, top-notch. Phillips excels at panel-to-panel storytelling and has a distinctive style – all pools of black and subtle emotions set off by a single line– that fits the proceedings perfectly; this is not a story whose mood would be improved by, say, Ed McGuinness.
Even the packaging is nice to look at: it’s a well designed comic, from the large logo on the wraparound cover painting to the Fell-style back matter at the end of the book, this issue offering a few early letters and an essay by Brubaker on the 1947 film Out of the Past. If there’s any indication that this book, from Marvel’s creator-owned “Icon” imprint, isn’t a typical Marvel book, it’s that there’s ads for competitors’ books in the back. Classy.
It seems woefully obvious that crime stories occupy little space in the modern comic landscape– Sleeper, as much love as its gotten here and elsewhere, was never a best-seller, and that had superhero trappings to sell it. Criminal is a similar aberration, Sleeper evolved: a pulp throwback that celebrates its genre without sacrificing any of the pathos and grit. It’s worth reading, and thus far a worthy addition to the growing canon of work from the writer of Captain America and Uncanny X-Men and the artist of Marvel Zombies.
RATING:
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Want a REAL steal? BUY this issue at X-WORLD and SAVE! (http://x-worldcomics.com/yourvirtualstore/shopexd.asp?id=21291)