The latest in a tragic string of homicides shocked citizens of Georgia when the body of the most recent victim was found in a residential garage.
Authorities describe the prime suspect in the case as a female named Kaydee, approximately one foot tall, weighing eight or nine pounds, with long black hair and white socks. They have released the following photograph of her, taken approximately one year ago, wantonly carousing with a known associate who may be currently harboring her.
Police say the locals have been cooperating with the investigation, though little new information has been brought to light. An entertainer known as Desi said, “I didn’t see her do it, but we all know she’s a killer. Is it time to play with the laser pointer yet?”
Police have identified a potential witness to the garage murder, a local named Fluffy. She was brought in for questioning and snugglification in the department’s sun room. A spokesperson for the police says, “Fluffy is much friendlier than she looks.”
2023’s Where the Body Was is an excellent standalone graphic novel from writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips, whose Criminal series I consider to be one of the great masterpieces of both the comic-book form and the crime-fiction genre. Where the Body Was explores the tragic events that took place in a single suburb in the Spring of 1984 from multiple first-person and third-person points of view, a narrative approach that is a bit like assembling pieces of a puzzle and which adds an extra depth of humanization to the characters as each of them gets a chance to give their personal perspective.
Brubaker has obviously seen Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon and taken its lessons to heart. Each first-person narrator is unreliable—though sometimes this is true because they do not have all the facts rather than, as in Kurosawa’s film, they are deliberately lying to make themselves look better. But Where the Body Was is, like the Criminal series, just as concerned with the lies people tell themselves as it is with constructing a plot based on the lies people tell each other.
Lies and deception are a major theme of Where the Body Was. Almost every character pretends to be something they are not, from the cheating wife and her affair partner to the kid dashing about in roller skates and a mask trying to be the local superhero—a striking contrast of the innocent pretend games of children to the potentially deadly pretend games of adults.
Almost every character lies to another about something but also to themselves, such as the young man who lies to the police about not knowing where his drug-addicted teenage love interest is, but also deludes himself that she could ever be faithful to him and have some kind of normal relationship.
The story also deals with love and lust and the crazy things we do for both of them, and a theme of nostalgia for our younger years. One of my favorite things about this story is that although it is set in the 1980s and allows its characters to feel nostalgia for those days, it never feels like it’s pandering to an aging audience by pretending the 1980s were some wonderful, magical, childhood utopia. I was a teenager in the 1980s, and they weren’t that great, so I find it insulting when recent books and films try to appeal to my personal nostalgia by referencing old pop songs and fashion trends. Beyond my fond memories of my high-school friends, I simply have no nostalgia for those days and can’t for the life of me fathom why anyone would—unless we’re talking about hardcore punk like Minor Threat, the early days of the Rollins Band, and the earliest albums by Fugazi, Mudhoney, Jane’s Addiction, Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, and Nirvana.
The other exception to my lack of nostalgia is the fact that many of my all-time favoritecomic-book series were created in the mid-80s, and Where the Body Was pays homage to comics in many ways. The wannabe superhero girl keeps a journal that, from its very first handwritten and ragged-edged captions, evokes Rorschach’s journal from The Watchmen, and Brubaker drives the point home (perhaps a bit too forcefully) with a chapter titled Who Watches the Watchmen. Anyone who has read the print version of Watchmen remembers the perfume scent Nostalgia, and how it relates to a theme of longing for earlier, simpler, more innocent days.
Two other comic books make notable appearances in this story, and both of them add subtle emphasis to the main themes of lies and nostalgia. The first is the cover of The Amazing Spider-man #127 from 1973, a Gerry Conway and Ross Andru story that is almost as old as I am, and the first issue of a two-part story that deals with a murder mystery involving layers of lies, deception, and people who are not who they appear to be.
I have no doubt that Brubaker and Phillips put some thought into choosing this particular silver-age issue to represent their themes in two panels of their story where it is not even commented on.
The other comic-book cover clearly depicted in a single panel is Superman #400, with “Anniversary” blazoned across the top. This comic was published with a cover date of October 1984, so it would have been on the shelves and racks in stores a couple of months before then, and it well-suits the aftermath of the main events of Where the Body Was. The issue focuses on events set in the far future, long after Superman is gone, and it is a collection of stories that offer various answers to the question, “Once Superman is gone, how will people remember him?”
As such, it is a perfect complement to the theme of nostalgia, especially since it appears near the end of Brubaker’s story when several characters break the fourth wall to express their feelings about the events of 1984 from a future perspective. But this issue also deals with lies and deception, from a snake-oil peddler who pretends to have been rescued by Superman in outer space and his grandson who pretends to be a random kid to help Grampa make more sales, to many other characters who cosplay as Superman, lie to their families about Superman, or try to uncover Superman’s “secret identity” based on old broadcasts of the TV show starring George Reeves.
I absolutely loved Where the Body Was, and the way it subverts murder-mystery tropes by not revealing until very late in the story who it was that actually died—an approach that engages you in guessing what the heck is happening until about ¾ of the way through the story, and keeps you guessing about how it happened until the very last pages. But the creative team’s choices about what vintage comics to include in the narrative was the icing on the cake.
My only negative criticism of the work would be that the points of view were handled a bit haphazardly, with the first-person narrators switching from past to present-tense at whiplash speed, and the omniscient third-person narrator seeming to arrive at random points to pick up the slack. There’s even a single panel where the third-person narrator speaks directly to a character, which I found jarring because it happened only one time and wasn’t consistent with the rest of the style.
I love multiple points of view in fiction, but I prefer when they follow some logical structure such as having only one narrator per scene or chapter. Where the Body Was plays fast and loose with POV, but I still found it remarkably easy to follow and loved the way the multiple narrators all worked together to create a multi-layered, deeply personal, and compelling description of the events.
This story also includes physical violence, drug use, explicit language, and the most graphically drawn sex scenes I have ever seen from Brubaker and Phillips—which, I might add, are awesome. Just don’t buy it for your toddlers, for fuck’s sake. This is a story created by adults for adults, for those of us who lived through crazy times years ago and now look back on them with a confusing mix of fondness and regret, and who love a crime drama that pushes the boundaries of how you can tell a story.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: Piracy, by definition, is an act of thievery on the high seas, and nothing in this film takes place on the ocean other than one swimming scene. So how can Emily be a pirate movie?
Yes, a lot of thievery happens once Emily’s life takes a dramatic turn into the world of credit-card fraud. But as I wrote on Talk Like a Pirate Day a couple of years ago, the classic Atlantic pirates—along with many of their contemporaries and modern-day scoundrels around the world—are defined by commonalities exemplified in Emily’s tale.
Emily didn’t wake up one day and decide to start stealing stuff. If that were the case, she’d be a run-of-the-mill kleptomaniac. Instead, like the legendary pirates, she was trapped in hopeless economic circumstances and treated like dirt by employers. When a financial opportunity presented itself, she joined a shady crew and learned the tricks of the trade. And like those pirates, Emily encountered the crushingly brutal aspects of a life of crime with no guarantee of safety or survival beyond what she could secure for herself through force of character and her wits.
Many people first became aware of Aubrey Plaza through the series Parks and Recreation, but I’ve never seen a full episode of it. I went into Emily the Criminal without knowing what to expect and was absolutely riveted by Plaza’s powerful performance. Missing from the film are her deadpan deliveries of off-beat comedic lines, and Emily lacks all the glamour and makeup of Plaza’s hilarious late-night talk-show appearances. Instead, the film depicts a plain and often disheveled woman at the end of her rope, working blue-collar jobs to survive in a mundane life, fighting for that life in violent encounters with dangerous men who easily outweigh her—and the tone is absolutely serious.
Emily is not a high-tech thriller but a down-and-dirty foray into street-level savagery. Not a single gun appears in Emily. Guns are an easy way for writers to cause sudden plot twists by shooting someone, but Emily takes a more challenging and creative path by pitting its characters against each other in places familiar to us—parking lots, homes, and the streets outside our doors—with tasers, box knives, stolen cars, pepper spray, and deception.
The result is a compelling piece of crime fiction which is well worth watching for fans of both the crime and pirate genres.
David Lapham’s Murder Me Dead is a nine-issue standalone series about a jazz pianist named Steven who gets caught in a web of violence and deception when he inherits a fortune following the death of his wife. We quickly learn he’s been having an affair with his sister-in-law, and this bit of dishonesty lends credence to his in-laws’ belief that he killed their daughter, despite the official ruling that her death was a suicide.
Soon, Tony arrives. Steven hasn’t seen him since high school fifteen years earlier, and didn’t particularly like him back then. It’s pretty obvious that Tony is looking to mooch off the grieving widower for an extensive bar tab at the very least, but perhaps something more. When Tony mentions that Steven’s high-school crush Tara is still around and always liked him, Steven tracks her down and rekindles the old spark they never consummated—although he nearly gets blasted with a shotgun first.
So begins a gritty, tragic tale populated by characters whose true intentions are always in doubt, whose sinister and ulterior motives are slowly revealed in suspenseful, page-turning fashion, and where everything goes from bad to worse for everyone involved.
Lapham fans undoubtedly know of his work on the noir crime series Stray Bullets, and Murder Me Dead taps into the same dark vein. But I found it easier to get into Murder Me Dead because, unlike Stray Bullets, it has a sympathetic main character who tries to do the right thing rather than a vast and largely unlikeable cast that seems perpetually hell-bent on always doing the wrong thing.
While Steven’s co-star Tara is clearly hiding things from him right from the first issue, her repeated victimization by other characters undermines our suspicion that she is a femme fatale. She makes too many blunders to be the conniving mastermind we often expect from that trope, and she appears to be more like Virginia Applejack from Stray Bullets—a basically decent person trapped in a world of felons, abusers, and perverts, yet struggling to make the best of her situation.
Its tight focus, relentless pace, sympathetic characters, and devious plot make Murder Me Dead one of my two favorite works by Lapham—alongside the similarly focused Stray Bullets: Killers which brought Virgina Applejack to center stage—and it’s every bit as darkly enjoyable as my favorite tales from Ed Brubaker’s Criminal. Highly recommended for fans of crime fiction.
Reading The Hunter sheds light on how much Donald Westlake’s series of Parker novels influenced the ultra-gritty Sin City series by Frank Miller. It seems fair to say that the style of Sin City also influenced Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of its predecessor, bringing it all full-circle.
For example, Cooke sometimes fills a page with a single image and a column of narration on the side, something Miller often did, especially in the first Sin City volume The Hard Goodbye, and which John Byrne later parodied in She-Hulk.
Cooke also shows a fondness for the BAM sound effect rendered in blocky lettering when a pistol fires.
It’s a classic sound that brings to mind Miller’s iconic pages from the sixth issue of The Hard Goodbye where the sound effect becomes the frames for the action, and it reminds us that Westlake’s Parker and Miller’s Marv are cut from the same cloth.
If you crave stories with empowered women, then Parker isn’t for you. Parker’s world is a man’s world. Women are trotted onstage mostly for sex and betrayal. In Cooke’s four volumes, the woman with the most agency and initiative is Alma in The Outfit, since she sets up the heist while having her own secret plans. She wants to be a femme fatale, but her treachery does not end well for her.
Despite depicting a few variations on the female form, Cooke seems to have a default idea about what a beautiful woman looks like, and the faces of women in The Hunter often resemble faces he’s drawn before in his superhero comics. The face of the woman who betrayed Parker could easily be Cooke’s Wonder Woman or Catwoman, and that makes her feel a bit generic.
Oddly, that works for The Hunter, because Westlake built the story around characters who don’t run very deep—whether male or female. They are more like archetypal examples of the tropes of hard-boiled detective and crime fiction, as if they are so primal to the genre that they need little exploration. The Hunter is unconcerned with delving into what makes them unique, remaining entirely focused on the relentless advance of the revenge plot. If you want well-rounded female characters with depth and agency, go read some Greg Rucka or Gail Simone stories—because it ain’t happening in Parker!
This criticism didn’t stop me from being totally caught up in the story. What I love about Cooke’s adaptation of The Hunter is how he chooses when to tell the story wordlessly and when to deliver exposition. We get some narration and one brief line of dialogue on the first page, and then nearly twenty-five pages of story told without a single word or sound effect. But in those wordless pages, all the action is so clear, expressive, and compelling that it comes as a shock when words once again appear on the page.
I also love how Cooke’s stripped-down approach to visuals honors Westlake’s stripped-down approach to prose for Parker. Compared to Westlake’s more lighthearted Dortmunder novels, the sentences in the Parker series are much leaner and tighter. Cooke’s artwork echoes that with a kind of minimalism, a simplicity that only conveys the bare essence of details to create the mood and tell the story. Panels lack borders, and thick shadows and bright light do almost all the work of defining images without lines. Cooke might depict the ironwork on a bridge by only inking its shadows and never drawing the outline of the overall shapes. While I love the detailed linework of artists such as Juan Jose Ryp, Geoff Darrow, or Steve McNiven, Cooke creates compelling environments and people using light, shadow, and monochromatic midtones.
The Outfit relies entirely on purple, and The Score uses a warm, dirty yellow that suits the setting in a hot desert mining town. While Sin City did something similar in a few volumes, those colors were more like occasional highlights than Cooke’s creative midtones.
It would have been fun to see another volume in red. The end of the fourth volume did promise another return of Parker. Sadly, Cooke was taken from us by cancer in 2016 at only fifty-three years old, and we never saw a fifth Parker adaptation.
Volumes two through four had interesting moments. The Outfit abruptly interrupts the established visual style to insert a series of explanations about a series of crimes. We get a multi-page newspaper article about a casino robbery, cartoon guides to horse-race gambling and smuggling cash on airplane flights to pay for heroin, and several pages of how to operate an illegal “numbers” betting operation. Everything I previously knew about “numbers running” came from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, so it was interesting to get Westlake’s rundown on these vintage illegal enterprises.
The fourth and final volume, Slayground, traps Parker in an abandoned amusement park where he comes up with clever ways to use the environment against gangsters who want his money from a job he narrowly escaped. One of his ideas is spraying a blob of paint on every surface in the hall of mirrors, then luring someone in. I’ve seen so many hall-of-mirrors scenes in movies that I hoped to never see one again, but this was a brilliant take that restored my faith in reflective surfaces.
Slayground also delivers powerful moments of cinematic, wordless storytelling such as a four-panel page of a car we just saw lose control on the icy roads on the previous page, and now goes tumbling over our heads into the distance. You can almost feel the impact.
But of all four tales, my favorite is the first: a relentless revenge over a double-cross that made a heist go horribly wrong. It’s harder than hard-boiled and blacker than noir, a morally vacant tale about a repulsive protagonist who gets the job done with his hands.
It’s no spoiler to tell you that Parker makes it out of The Hunter alive. Westlake wrote twenty-four of these novels, and Cooke adapted four. At this point, you go into the series knowing the stakes are not life-or-death for Parker.
That does lower the dramatic tension. If you know the main character can’t be killed, then that lowers your investment in his success. In a series such as Sin City or Criminal, where individual stories are told out of order, a character might very well meet their end in any particular episode—and often does. Investment is high. You never know what’s coming next.
With Parker, we know he is unstoppable. The fun comes not from wondering whether he will live or die, but discovering how he bends circumstances to his will no matter what life throws at him. Parker’s world is a grim place, and he is not a role model nor even likeable. But he is enjoyable as an immovable object in a world of irresistible forces, or maybe the other way around. He possesses a singular focus and physical strength, and a superior insight into his amoral world of crime, lies, and power that helps him make it out alive—and, if he’s lucky, with a bit of money in his pocket.
Collector’s Guide: You can currently get the complete four-volume set of Cooke’s Parker adaptations in digital format for about $40 through Kindle/Comixology. Each volume was also printed in hardcover and paperback editions.
Criminal by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips has long been one of all-time favorite works of fiction in any medium, and the greatest crime is that I’ve never written about it since discovering it around thirteen years ago.
My first exposure to this prolific creative team was the Sleeper series, which was either the first or second time Brubaker and Phillips worked together. Set in the same “universe” as the WildC.A.T.s (created by Jim Lee) and featuring the villainous mastermind Tao (created by Alan Moore), Sleeper was an unsettling combination of the two main elements which gave rise to the superhero genre: crime fiction and science fiction.
But Sleeper had little use for superheroes, beyond guest-starring Grifter. Instead, it focused on the adventures of villains doing covert operations for shadowy organizations. Subverting the superhero genre, Brubaker treated Sleeper like a pulp crime story with a first-person narration by a deeply broken, hardboiled protagonist you would expect to find in a noir detective novel.
When I discovered Criminal shortly thereafter, I was thrilled to see what Brubaker and Phillips could do with a pulp crime story without any of the superpowers and sci-fi. I joined the ongoing series around the time the first storyline was wrapping up, so I got a subscription and enjoyed the rabid, edge-of-my-seat anticipation of every new issue.
But it’s hard to say why I love this series so much. It’s hopeless, bleak, and downright depressing. Anything resembling a character’s redemption arc is sure to end in tragedy and tears. Everyone is either broken, or despicable, or both. Characters tend to be either victims of abuse, or abusers, or both. Any brief moments of happiness are either doomed, or illusory, or both. The world of Criminal is an inescapable hell that destroys everyone, even the most powerful and the most innocent.
Maybe my fascination with the series is related to that part of the human mind that can’t resist looking at a crash on the highway. That sick part of our monkey brains that slows down to see the carnage until the road is backed up with gawkers for miles. It’s probably the part of our minds that is responsible for slasher flicks and so-called “disaster porn”, the part that craves horror and violence even in otherwise well-adjusted people who normally avoid such things. Maybe Criminal channels that aspect of human experience into fiction where it’s safe, where no one really gets hurt. You can gawk at a fictional train wreck and not feel guilty.
Criminal is also a remarkable feat of storytelling. You can read any one of the self-contained stories on its own or, as Brubaker often says, in any order at all. The stories feature numerous recurring characters connected by the strands of their web of crime, and the stories are not delivered in chronological order. You might meet someone in one story, then discover their childhood in another. Someone who dies in one story might appear years earlier in another.
Through it all, narrative captions tend to focus on one character’s internal experience or monologue per issue, sometimes describing the action that appears in the panels, but more often a step removed from the story that Phillips tells visually, giving insight into what characters are thinking or feeling. You also see certain events from multiple perspectives—sometimes from issue to issue, and sometimes from story to story. This approach amplifies the feeling that all events are connected and inevitable.
Criminal influenced my approach to storytelling when I started writing fiction, but the criminals I write about revel in their lawless lifestyles. They experience horror, but they mostly enjoy being on the wrong side of the law and doing what they do. They have fun!
Any fun that Brubaker’s criminals enjoy is a short-lived uptick on their downward spiral to despair and disaster. If you’re looking for happy endings or uplifting messages about the human condition, Criminal isn’t for you. The most fortunate characters end up dead, and the least fortunate keep on living, trapped in Brubaker’s sprawling saga of doom, degradation, and mutual destruction.
But the series is so well-constructed, so impenetrably dark, and so well-told that I find it impossible to avert my eyes from the wreck, and I have read and re-read each story many times. I think the saving grace, what makes it possible to wander into this cruel, noir world, is that so many of the characters evoke sympathy and empathy. Many of Brubaker’s villains tend to have some spark of humanity that makes them relatable. They are rarely evil for the sake of being evil, like so many poorly done “bad guys”. Instead, they have been twisted and morally deformed by the awful events of their lives.
Even a complete scumbag such as Teeg Lawless, who often beats and abandons his two sons, is shown to believe that in his own fucked-up way, he thinks he loves his kids. His deranged and damaged brand of “love” is not one I would wish on any child, but it’s consistent with the way that even the worst villains in these tales tend to think of themselves as some kind of heroes, even when they are so incredibly wrong.
That’s something we need to think about more often but has become increasingly rare. It is now easier than ever for delusional people to find similarly deluded people in Internet echo chambers and rally around causes that range from nonsensical to dangerous. It has become increasingly easy for people to embrace messages of hate in the name of love, to proclaim treason as patriotism, to promote lies they accept as truth, and to advance anti-social policies under the guise of freedom.
We could all use a bit of self-reflection to step back and ask ourselves whether or not our heroic stances are, in fact, villainous. When writing a good fictitious villain, the best authors know that the villain should be a hero in his or her own narrative about the world.
But that isn’t something that’s only true in fiction. It works in stories because it expresses something true about real people. I often look back on my life and am filled with regret for things I did and mistakenly thought were right at the time, only to realize later that despite being a hero in my own story, I was the villain in someone else’s, and things I believed to be right were so very, very wrong.
Criminal warns this is a universal aspect of human experience, and if there is any moral compass or lesson to be learned from Brubaker’s tragic tales, it is that we need to question our own ideas, assumptions, decisions, and sense of justice. If we don’t, then we will remain as trapped as the characters in Criminal, and nothing good can come from that.
Collector’s Guide:Criminal is spread out over the first ten-issue series, the second seven-issue series, the third twelve-issue series, the four-issue The Last of the Innocent, a single-issue Special Edition, a tenth-anniversary Special Edition, a standalone graphic novel, and the standalone Wrong Time, Wrong Place, for which I can’t seem to find a link. Various TPBs and “deluxe” editions have collected parts of it, and they range from easily found to difficult. I would love to see a definitive Criminal Omnibus collecting the entire thing in one or two volumes, but that has yet to happen.
This week’s pick from the indie comics short box is Utopiates, a four-issue black-and-white series focusing on characters who take a drug that temporarily alters their personality and emotions, but with violent and disastrous results.
The first issue opens with a full page of Gen-X angst that sets up what, at first, appears to be a simple tale about a young man who takes a drug to escape the dull hopelessness of his life.
By the end of the first issue, it becomes clear this tale is not so simple. We learn that the drug is somehow giving people specific personality traits because it is composed of genetic material copied from specific people. I don’t buy that bit of pseudo-science at all, but playing along with this central idea of injecting genetics like drugs does make for some interesting developments. For example, the young man in the first issue starts killing people his drug dealer assigns to him, but when he injects some Jack Ruby DNA, he kills the wrong person. This doesn’t end well for him.
The second and third issue tell the story of a different young man who served in a war as part of a private military contractor’s invasion force. We learn that he and all the contractors were constantly hopped up on one of these genetic drugs to reduce their fear and increase ferocity.
This two-part story shows how the soldier does not adapt well to normal society after his contract is complete and he can no longer get his drugs. The robotic psych counselor the company forces him to see is useless, so the young man starts looking for a source of the drug. His path leads him to discover whose DNA he and his troops were injecting.
The fourth issue tells the story of another former soldier, a woman who becomes an assassin for hire much like the character in the first issue. It suggests that the mysterious drug dealer in all these stories is giving out these gene-drugs and manipulating people as an art form. I found that motivation a bit lackluster, but I suspect that if the series had continued, then writer Josh Finney would have given us more depth and detail about what makes the dealer tick.
I love the artwork in this series, with Finney collaborating with artist Kat Rocha to produce moody, dramatic pages that look amazing without color. I don’t know why the series ended, but it feels like it could be a treatment for an ongoing TV series with action, adventure, mystery, futurism, and a bit of social commentary. Finally, it’s possible that Finney took the name of the series from a 1964 book detailing research into why people take LSD. You can read a review and summary of that book in the University of Chicago archives.
The four issues of Utopiates make a fairly quick but thought-provoking read, and you can have them for about $2 a piece.
This week’s pick from the indie short box of comics is the complete four-volume collection Queen & Country: The Definitive Edition. It’s also an entry in the big box of free comics series, because I wouldn’t have this collection if not for this blog’s readers. This espionage thriller featuring a British female spy comes from the mind of crime novelist Greg Rucka and an art team that changes with every major arc, giving each episode a unique look and feel.
The four volumes total nearly 1500 pages, which includes the entire single-issue series and three supplementary Declassified series, plus a slew of extras such as interviews, scripts, and sketchbooks. I loved it, with a few reservations, and it was maybe the third time I read the series.
Years ago, I sold a complete collection, and you can see photos of the interior art and full-color covers in my old post about the collection. I had discovered a few scattered issues in a used bookstore and gradually pieced together the set before selling it. With the Definitive Edition, it was great to read it all again in chronological order.
Still, you will find a few a gaps in chronology. Queen & Country is also a series of prose novels, and the comic-book adaptations sometimes skip a novel. “These events take place after the events in [novel]” comes up at least once. But, you get enough context from each story to follow along anyway, and a helpful flashback or two fills in the important gaps.
With the Definitive Edition, you won’t get the full-color covers, though the black-and-white versions are high quality. The page size is slightly smaller than a typical comic book, which occasionally makes the lettering a little hard to read. It was not as bad as the Tintin collection, which practically required a magnifying glass. I only struggled in a couple of stories, such as the first one where Tara’s thoughts appear in a cursive script that didn’t fare well from being shrunk.
The black-and-white art of the original series still looks incredible at this size, though some of the edges of panels disappear in the gutter — unless you want to test the limits of how far you can force the book’s spine open. A wider blank space in the gutter would have been a good thing. But, each of the four volumes is a sturdy paperback with a solid binding and high-quality paper.
Overall, it’s an awesome way to enjoy the complete series, and way easier and more cost-effective than trying to hunt down all the single issues one-by-one.
The art and writing are top-notch, with a compelling lead character who does some bad-ass spy stuff but has way more interesting internal and emotional conflicts than, say, James Bond. Tara Chace has depth, and she changes over the course of the series, and her world is turned upside down more than once. She has a strong supporting cast, and several merit standalone stories as leads in their own right.
Toward the end of the series, reading it one weekend as I did, I noticed there were an awful lot of scenes of people talking in offices, and pages of people having discussions that made a point but didn’t really advance the adventure. These were interesting for a while in the beginning, but by the end I was way more more invested in what Tara was doing than what some guys in offices were droning on about, and I skipped a few scenes.
You’ll probably feel the same way about the leading lady, and your mind might be blown at the cliffhanger ending of the series, and you might even want to pick up some of the novels afterward!
This week’s pick from the short box of indie comics takes us once again into the world of crime fiction. A History of Violence from John “Judge Dredd” Wagner and Vince Locke really puts the “novel” in “graphic novel”, telling a deeply detailed story in its nearly 300 pages. I read it years ago but didn’t see the film until this summer. The book was more satisfying, especially the ending, which is a visceral punch to the gut in print but completely re-written and watered down for the film.
So, let’s start at the beginning, because A History of Violence opens with murderous intent.
Pretty soon, the murderers stop for a bite to eat in typical, small-town America, where everything is quaint, peaceful, and family-friendly. But when they try to start trouble at the local diner, the dude at the counter decides homie don’t play thatshit, and he totally destroys them.
Diner dude wastes these guys and becomes a local celebrity. There, the story gets bogged down with scenes of his resultant interactions with the yuk-yuks from Anywhere, USA as they fawn over him at little-league games and other scenes I could skip. But this shift in the hero’s calm, daily life gets kicked up a notch when the leader of a criminal organization recognizes diner dude in a newspaper article, and decides to visit.
This scene begins a gradual reveal of diner dude’s past, and how he came to be involved with the underworld in his youth and eventually assumed a new identity so he could live a pastoral life in Generic, USA. The middle third of the book tells that story as a flashback, and it’s almost as much fun as the part in the Godfather novel where we flashback to Vito Corleone’s rise to power in his youth.
The first time I read A History of Violence, I couldn’t put it down. But upon re-reading, I could have done without so many extended, dialogue-heavy scenes of regular folks standing or sitting around while having an interpersonal drama. It often feels like this could be a real barnburner of a tale if we could just cut some of the “normal folks chatting in a mild state of distress” scenes, and get into the absolutely fucked-up criminal world that really drives the plot and drama. And by “absolutely fucked up”, I mean pages like this:
Earlier, I implied I didn’t like the movie, but mostly what I hated were the changes to the ending. In fact, the film did a better job portraying the shoot-out on diner dude’s lawn where his son was involved, and the film had a somewhat tighter pace. Also, Ed Harris as the eyeless criminal guy totally rocks.
I’m a bit ambivalent about the art in this story. The panel layouts and the visual storytelling of both quiet conversations and brutal conflict are top-notch, but I can’t escape the feeling that that I am looking at a sketch of the story instead of the final version. The art is very scratchy, and while it has a visceral power, after a couple hundred pages I started wishing another inker would come along and tighten it up. On the other hand, this is a gritty and compelling story once you get into it, and a gritty visual style suits it well.
Fans of crime fiction should read A History of Violence at least once because, despite its flaws, it is a dramatic and emotional journey that not even the film could match, and it isn’t a story you will soon forget. The original edition is long out of print, but the 2005 reprint will run you about $20.
Like last week’s pick from the short box of indie comics, this week features another crime story with a bad-ass female lead. Down is a four-issue series by Warren Ellis with art from Tony Harris and Cully Hamner, and its portrayal of a police officer infiltrating a violent criminal organization reminds me in some ways of one of my favorite films: The Departed by Martin Scorsese. Down isn’t quite as complex, as the fast pace and tight focus relentlessly blaze through the story up until the bitter end. But like The Departed, this story doesn’t end where you think it will.
Down puts our leading lady into the middle of a conflict between crooked cops and even more crooked gangsters, and every step of the journey takes her into increasingly questionable decisions about just whose side she is on. In her quest to get close to the criminal leader, she is forced to consider just how far she is willing to go to maintain her cover.
Down has a high body count and graphic violence, but I feel the real intensity takes place around just how much her experiences deform and re-define the protagonist’s conception of who she is and what role she wants to play in life. At some point, she realizes she has crossed a line she can never step back over and return to normalcy, and her only option is to choose a new path of her own design.
It’s one of my favorite of Ellis’ short works, and all the better because it doesn’t end with a big explosion, a convention he tended to over-use when he seemed to be cranking out a new series every week. It’s a fun read if you like crime fiction and bad-ass women, and you can get it for about $2 an issue.
Today’s pick from the short box of indie comics is Felon, a four-issue series from the mind of Greg Rucka, who is known for both his crime stories and his preference for writing female lead characters. I have a few other Rucka gems to share with you later, but they all feature a detective as the main character, and this one follows the adventures of a remorseless criminal.
She’s a bad-ass without being an over-the-top action hero, and even though we are sympathetic to her because her crew screwed her over, she isn’t exactly role-model material. She’s concerned about one thing, and one thing only, and this focus on her goal is apparent from page one. She is released from prison and only has three words to say:
She sticks to this simple, direct goal through three issues of violence, and the plot is pretty straight-forward, even when a new heist enters the picture. But the drive, the unrelenting focus she maintains, and her subordination of any empathy or morality to the intensity of her avarice made a huge impression on me. Felon influenced my own stories about an unrepentant female criminal who constantly smokes cigarettes and blasts anyone who gets in her way, so I owe Rucka and company a debt of gratitude.
But it’s the fourth issue that really blows my mind. The third issue brings an end to the heist story, and you wonder what’s next, but then Rucka turns the world upside down. The fourth issue introduces a female detective who is on the trail of our leading lady, completely switches to her point of view, and shows how her focus on the case destroys her personal life. Also, the first three issues are full color, but the fourth is black and white. The titular felon only appears in flashbacks related by other characters, such as a scene that recalls one of her robberies and demonstrates just how cold she can be.
Felon is a quick read but a fun one if you love crime fiction and bad-ass women, and you can get it for about $2 an issue.
This week’s pick from the indie box isn’t even indie, having been published by DC Comics, but it has an indie feel and showcases the talents of two future superstars. Scene of the Crime is an early collaboration between Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark, who would later do an amazing run together on Daredevil at Marvel.
Scene of the Crime follows the adventures of a private investigator as he unravels an increasingly sinister and fucked-up story, and I wanted to love it. It would probably make a solid movie. But after the second issue, I was flipping through pages to see the big reveal. The narration in the captions starts in first gear on page one and never really accelerates, and the art is sometimes too clean when it could use more grit and grime.
Scene of the Crime faces a structural problem in that we as readers get hints that the investigator has some past tragedy, but we don’t get told what it is until the final pages. This makes it feel more like a postscript than something crucial to understanding the character’s motivations, and by the time we get there, the main story is basically over. So, did it really matter? It feels like it didn’t.
Despite its flaws, Scene of the Crime is a glimpse into the early days of a writer and artist team who eventually crafted tightly wound, tense crime stories. The four-issue series shows the team has the ability to tell a complex tale of crime and mystery, and I see it as a stepping stone to later masterpieces such as the Brubaker/Lark run on Daredevil and Brubaker’s collaboration with Sean Phillips on Criminal, one of my all-time favorite works of fiction.
Author Paul O’Connor joins us today for an interview about his newly launched digital comic book story 4 Seconds. You can read 4 Seconds for free at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent. Paul discusses with us the technical side of producing a story for Thrillbent’s unique reading platform, including how he invented a new scripting technique working with artist Billy King on the initial concept design and artist Karl Kesel on the final story.
Paul, what is 4 Seconds and how did it come about?
4 Seconds is an original comic story in digital form published at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent site. It is free to read right now, and I hope everyone will give it a shot. The story is self-contained and easy to complete in one sitting. It tells the tale of a petty thief who discovers she can see into the future… but only 4 seconds into the future! This proves to be just enough superpower to get her into trouble.
The story was born when I won Mark Waid’s open-microphone pitch contest at San Diego Comic-Con. I was super-excited for this job, because I am a big believer in the new way stories can be told at Thrillbent. There are dozens of stories at the site, many of them are free, and they all have something to say about how comic stories can be told beyond the printed page.
As someone who makes books, I’d love to hear about the technical side of creating 4 Seconds specifically for the Thrillbent digital format. What’s unique about Thrillbent compared to printed comics, or even other digital platforms?
Even during the pitch stage, it was important to me that I create a story best told (or perhaps only told) in the Thrillbent format. Thrillbent specializes in digital-native stories that expand the way comics stories are told. It is critical to understand that these are still comics stories. They aren’t motion comics, and they don’t have soundtracks or spoken dialogue. They are still words, pictures, and panels that the reader pages through at their own pace.
One way things are different is in the fluidity of transitions afforded by this platform. For instance, we can do actual fades, wipes, and pans, imparting a more cinematic feel to a traditional comics story. Likewise, this platform allows for new types of page architecture and panel borders, and new approaches to balloon placement and dialogue construction. In creating 4 Seconds, artist Karl Kesel and I tried to take full advantage of being in a paperless environment, and using this platform to tell our story in a more memorable way. 4 Seconds is built from the ground-up to be a new thing in familiar clothing.
Tell me how those possibilities came to life in creating a scene from 4 Seconds.
For example, we might have a “master shot”—say, a nighttime interior of the mansion of the villainous Anton Glass. Rather than show the entire shot at once, our story might reveal it in portions—first showing just that slice illuminated by the moody moonlight leaking through the floor-to-ceiling windows, then picking up the trail of bloody footprints on the floor, then finding the outstretched hand of a body lying just inside the shadows.
Across this, we place our characters, posing them for the critical moments of storytelling. And then we bring in dialogue balloons, captions, and sound effects. What Karl had to deliver were all the many individual panels, frames, and character poses that made up the story, which are then placed in the correct order for viewing via Thrillbent.
The results are equivalent to what might be many panels and pages in a paper comic, all playing out in the same narrative space using comic conventions of panels to parse time and focus reader attention on the sequential elements needed to tell the story. It’s still the same toolbox used in conventional comics, but there’s greater freedom of expression in how it’s used, particularly when it comes to isolating specific elements that you want the reader to see.
How was writing the 4 Seconds script different from comic scripts you’ve written for other media? Was it anything like a traditional comic book script?
This was a very different process. The Thrillbent format demanded that I take a new approach to scripting, and I also challenged myself to think in visual terms from the get-go. I deliberately went outside of my comfort zone of concentrating on dialogue and description and leaving everything else up to the artist. Instead, I wanted to provide a deeply thought-out visual blueprint for Karl, which he could (and did!) use as a springboard to make things even better in the penciling stage.
That meant I was doing scene-blocking and transitions—new things for me—and also figuring out how to break the rules as fast as I made them! To tie it all together, I invented a hybrid script form that offers conventional comics direction, dialogue, etc., but abandoned panels as the unit of storytelling in favor of frame advances. Determining how much information to add/change to each advance drives the pace of the story, and sometimes the challenge is as much about deciding what to retain from previous frames more than it is about what to add.
Thank you, Paul! 4 Seconds keeps the twists and turns coming right up to the very end. Revealing the story in frames like this means readers share Cassie’s experience of her world. They know something is coming in that empty space of the future, but they can’t see far enough ahead to be sure what it is. I found it drew me into the story and made me care that much more about what happened to her.
Privacy in Peril: The Private Eye and Recent Developments in Privacy, DRM, and Copyright
One of my classes this semester deals with telecommunications policy in the USA. Even though I am late to the party on The Private Eye, I spent an evening this week devouring all ten issues of the digital comic book series. I was pleasantly surprised to discover it deals with many of the concerns we discussed in the telecom class. Our first discussion centered around two articles on mobile apps that either lack adequate security or mine your device for your personal data and contacts.
The Private Eye addresses privacy and intellectual property concerns not just in its content but in its form. It comes to us from author Brian K. Vaughan (who wrote such critically acclaimed series as Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, and wrote for the TV show Lost for a time) with art from Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente. It is available at http://panelsyndicate.com/comics/tpeye as ten individual issues and now in two 150-page volumes which collect the complete story.
First, the content of this science-fiction/mystery adventure deals with privacy and the Internet. It proposes a future where all the information people stored about themselves in “the cloud” was exposed through an event called “the flood”. Dialogue reveals that making people’s search histories public destroyed their lives. As a result, the Internet exists no more, and people are paranoid about protecting their privacy. Just as people do today in online forums and multi-player video games, people in this future use costumes and fake names to mask their identity and explore their fantasies, sexual kinks, and other aspects of identity they want kept private. Photographing people without their consent has become a crime, a crime the story’s hero commits for cash as a private investigator. The story’s villain wants to [spoiler alert] bring back the Internet.
But besides the privacy conflict at the story’s center, the distribution of this series also ties in with concerns about copyright, digital rights management, and the ease of sharing content through the Internet. The series is only available digitally, and it is sold on a “pay what you can” basis. Readers choose their own price, even if that price is zero dollars. This addresses the sales problem of digital content: How do you get people to pay a specific price for digital content when it is so easily downloaded and shared among users? Here, there is no problem. If people cannot or do not want to pay, they can still get the series directly from the creators without skirting the law, and those who can afford to support the work can choose to do so.
The download files, made available upon payment, are given free of Digital Rights Management, a system of protecting copyrighted and trademarked works which has proven problematic for users and courts. Recent headlines have shown how silly DRM takedown requests can get, with Forbes reporting in August that “Columbia Pictures, the studio behind the critically-panned movie Pixels, has succeeded in getting a number of utterly unrelated videos pulled from Vimeo — but the only actual footage from the movie to be taken down is Columbia’s own official trailer.”
DRM takedown requests have become the occupation of lawyers who can file them without any actual investigation, leading to such ridiculous outcomes as random videos that mention the word “pixels” in ways unrelated to the film having been forced offline. Headlines in August also revealed UK legislation which is so technologically mis-informed that it would criminalize making a back-up copy of your own mp3 music files library. The creators of The Private Eye have sidestepped this nonsense and made their files available without DRM restrictions on the files.
The Private Eye, besides being an excellent and entertaining read, highlights the growing divide between how large, institutionally entrenched corporations are dealing with these concerns compared to the way independent creators are looking for new and more flexible solutions. This is taking place alongside a surge in advance sales (such as Michael Gira’s band Swans releasing limited-edition, handmade concert recordings to fund the production of upcoming studio albums) and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter which help secure funding before a project is finished rather than trying to control “piracy” after the fact. These solutions favor creators who understand the unique technological environment of our time and want to maintain creative control without resorting to the cumbersome and ill-advised measures favored by the industry giants, their lawyers, and our legislatures.
To close on a visual note, I especially appreciate that The Private Eye is the first digital comic I have seen which looked awesome on my monitor due to the horizontally wider aspect ratio. Comics made at the right aspect ratio for print just never look as great on my screen. I usually need to zoom in to read the text, and thus can’t see the whole page at once, which is part of the joy of comics. The Private Eye fixes this beautifully and lends itself to creative page layouts that take full advantage of its aspect ratio. Go pick up the two collected volumes and pay what you can!
No DRM, no encryption, just plain files optimized for on-screen reading. Available in English, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese & French.
I discovered Queen & Country on the Totally Top Secret Fifty Cent Rack last year. Someone blessed me by leaving about 2/3 of the series there, and it was easy enough to fill in the rest with VF/NM copies at about a buck a piece.
I’ve read many of Greg Rucka’s crime and detective stories before, but this is my favorite. Rucka made his mark at DC with his work on Batman in Detective Comics, among others. I prefer his indie short stories like Felon for Image/Top Cow, and Oni Press titles Whiteout and Stumptown. Queen & Country, also from Oni Press, proved as enjoyable as any of these, if not more.
It takes a while to get into the series if you read it like a novel, due to Rucka’s insistence on action above introspection. We get right into the thick of things with the characters without much context as to who they are. Only as they begin to deal with the consequences of their spy operations do we begin to bond with them and see what they are made of.
Told in chapters over five or six issues at a time, Queen & Country brings in a different art team for each chapter. Each dynamically different style gives us a new sense of the characters, too. We see them conceptualized anew with each new story arc. You might expect that to throw off the flow of the title, but it only deepened my enjoyment. Rucka’s scripts show us his characters more than tell us about them in exposition. Each art team shows in a unique way.
Prize published Treasure Comics from 1943-1947. It had all kinds of stories, from humor to adventure to fantasy. Lurking in the pages of the tenth issue you will find a crime story by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon: Tomorrow’s Murder! Kirby and Simon did not stay on the title for long but other greats like Frank Frazetta were also featured in it before its demise.
Let’s set the time machine for 1959! Take a look this week at a stack of Marvel’s Strange Tales. You’ll find fast-paced science fiction stories with an occasional occult theme thrown in for good measure. (Strange Tales ran more horror in the early 1950’s, before the Comics Code Authority nonsense began.) Steve Ditko and Jack Kirby feature prominently alongside other masters of these classic short-form comics.
“I Dared to Defy Merlin’s Black Magic!” with art by Steve Ditko; “I am the Man Who Will Destroy Your World!”; “When the Saucer Strikes!” with art by Paul Reinman; “I Fought the Man Who Couldn’t Be Killed!”; “I Am the Man Without a Face!” with art by Joe Sinnott.
Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.
Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.
Once upon a time, I had a job at a title company with a system that gave intercom access to the whole place via your desktop phone. When things got tense, depressing, or just plain boring, I put RoboCop on the loudspeakers. Held him up to the phone, pressed the button on his chest, and thrilled the entire staff with his “realistic machine gun sounds”. Ratta-tat-tat, motherfuckers!
Of course, this was 1997. Getting your ass shot off by your coworkers hadn’t become a national hobby yet. Back in the twentieth century, a little RoboCop in the office made people laugh. Tension breaker. Stress reliever. Nothing but Good Clean Fun with a weapon arm, M-16, and an assault rifle.
In the real world, you have a lot more to worry about than the choking hazard of small plastic parts. One of the first times my dad was on TV, he was the first police officer to approach the parked vehicle of a very disturbed man. The man had gone into his office and shot a bunch of people, did the high-speed chase thing, then blew his brains out in a parking lot. The only upside of making a to-do list like that for your day is that you won’t need to make any more to-do lists.
Well, this is what happens when people keep things bottled up day after day, year after year. Instead, they should stop once a day to let RoboCop do the machine gunning. Let RoboCop handle the assault rifle. His visor lights up when he rat-a-tats. It looks cool as hell, and no one gets hurt.
Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.
Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.
Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.
Early issues of Justice Traps the Guilty feature legendary collaborators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby producing “true” crime stories. The lives of criminals seemed to fascinate Kirby, and he would return to the subject twenty years later with In the Days of The Mob.