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Criminal #1 (Series 2) Posted 14 Mar 2008 Writer: Ed Brubaker Artist: Sean Phillips Colors: Val Staples Publisher: Icon  4.50 out of 5 Stars Reviewed by Adam McGovern

In the relative handful of comics I’d recommend unreservedly as literature to those who aren’t already involved, Criminal is near the top of the list — an uncompromisingly horrifying, uncommonly humane anatomy of the embattled human psyche and the fragile façade of civilization in the trappings of a crime-noir thriller. Brubaker and Phillips have not just established a series but constructed a world, with endless possibilities and deep, unpredictable personalities. The book’s dreamlike, never-named locale has bits and pieces of every big city you’ve ever seen, and its streetscapes and outskirts appear the way every inescapable hometown looks from the inside. Fuzzy in its details yet familiar in every corner, it’s a kind of mystical, movie-textured purgatory for trapped lowlifes, corrupt or overwhelmed cops, and faceless ordinary citizens with everything to lose. This issue restarts the clock in more ways than one, taking the numbering back to 1 and turning to the pasts of some characters that long-running readers have been familiar with (or thought they were) and others that we’ve only heard about, while letting new readers drift into town with perfect timing.

“Brubaker and Phillips have constructed a world with endless possibilities and deep, unpredictable personalities.”

The first story looks back at Jake “Gnarly” Brown, in present time the eminence of the neutral bar at which the series’ scoundrels and innocents can enjoy some release and refuge, and in the past, we now know, a minor gangland enforcer and then a promising legit boxer with a biblically complicated relationship to his de facto brother, a privileged white mob scion. An old, betrayed lover shows up and her reappearance visits a curse-like change of fate upon the once-optimistic fighter and sets the murderous life course of his former best friend.

This series is a desolately beautiful homage and elegy to the American outlaw myth — respectful of its characters but always aware of what a myth it is — so it fits well that, while readers have been after Brubaker to pay more tribute to Blaxploitation, we get this sad, somber story of one of the everyday bruthas who were walking the streets that Shaft and Super Fly only knew from soundstages. The story is narrated from inside Gnarly’s head, and we hear his regrets, cautions, and awareness of inevitable consequences. Reading this I realized that Gnarly is the only character in the whole damn book so far who’s truly conscious of his reactions to things — haunted bankrobber Leo and vengeance-obsessed gang infiltrator Tracy, the stars of previous arcs, are very conscious of the forces that sweep them forward, but never draw a line between themselves and what these forces make them do. Gnarly is always taking a step back in his mind and seeing the situation for what could happen (and what might have); the guilt he suffers is ironic since he’s born with more strikes against him than any of the characters we’ve seen so far (and ends up less of a scumbag), but he considers the options like a boxer in the ring and ends up surviving like a true fighter in life. Guilt isn’t the only price; it also seems that, unlike Leo and Tracy, who desperately try to re-create a family structure among their underworld elders or gang comrades no matter how uneasy, Gnarly can stand on his own because he’s truly, utterly alone. An unhappy lesson for an unhappy book — and a necessary understanding for one of the major players in some of the most necessary reading in comics.

Only once (and never before in Brubaker’s lovingly crafted and uncannily inhabited alternate world) are we wrenched out of the action by one of the sucker punches of anachronism that have been proliferating in period comics as postmodernism robs us of our perspective — Gnarly mostly “can’t be that guy” in 1972 because the colloquialism is two or three decades from being invented — but memory is tricky and self-image is even harder to get in a direct hit on, and Brubaker & Phillips’ reality, in its overwhelming scope, remains timeless and unfailingly true.

 

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