Review: Criminal #1

Criminal #1
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips
Published by Icon/Marvel Comics. $2.99 USD

I've liked crime stories as long as I can remember. Well, scratch that: I guess as a kid I was more into science fiction, and my mysteries didn't get any heavier than The Hardy Boys or Encyclopedia Brown. But around high school, I got into Gregory McDonald's Fletch series, and then in my early, lost 20s I dove headfirst into everything of Jim Thompson's brief, tortured noir books I could get my hands on. And I've always liked heist movies, crimes planned carefully that go awry when one unforeseen event occurs or a weak link in one of the criminals breaks. I love that stuff.

So the new Brubaker/Phillips project is an easy sell with me, honestly. Their previous series, Sleeper, is one of my favorite books of the past several years, and one of the few series that never dipped in quality and got out at the right time with a satisfying finale. And it turns out to be a good warm-up for Criminal in a lot of ways. Sleeper was an espionage story set in a world of superheroes, so the two creators got to blend the two genres in unique ways, but perhaps it suffered commercially from this "neither fish nor fowl" impression it left on those who wanted a straight superhero or espionage book.

Criminal is a straight heist book, the first issue introducing the characters and briefly mentioning the score--a bunch of diamonds, supposedly easy to take because there's a crooked cop on the inside. The similarities to Sleeper come more from the character traits. The main character, Leo, is, like Holden Carver from Sleeper, a tough, resourceful man who nevertheless has a weakness or two, and the tension comes from the anticipation the reader feels as to when we will find out if the weaknesses are fatal flaws or can be overcome. One weakness is to women, or at least a certain woman, in this case the widow of Leo's partner in the Job That Went Bad. Another weakness may be in a loyalty or soft spot for old friends who drag you down or make you a target--a common Brubaker character trait--in this case his late father's old partner, now an addled junkie. And then there are the authority figures who are willling to use Leo to get what they want but don't care about him and may screw him over--also found in Sleeper but in this case they're the crooked cop on the inside and the cop who coerced Leo into the job and who has some axe to grind with him.

It's all really wonderful, as tense and cool as any comic you'll read this year, and probably as entertaining as most movies, or at least it will be by the time the story plays out. I don't make those kinds of predictions much anymore, but Brubaker is really in his element here, developing a very real, dangerous world out of tasty details like the subway scam artist who fakes seizures for money...and who is really an epileptic! It's clear Brubaker has been soaking up as much John D. MacDonald and Ed McBain and George Pelecanos and anybody else he can. He seems so exhilarated by what he's doing he even tries for some poetic passages in the narration. I don't think they entirely came off, but I appreciated the reach. For his part, Phillips is as good as he's ever been. The storytelling is bigger and more straightforward than in Sleeper, but that doesn't mean the effort has diminished. If anything, he's putting more emotion and pathos into the faces of the characters and the tarnished, pitiless city they inhabit. I can't think of a book I'm more looking forward to reading.