Criminal (comics)

AUTHOR: Brubaker, Ed

ARTIST: Sean Phillips (illustrator); Val Staples (colorist)

PUBLISHER: Marvel Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 2006-

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2007-

Publication History

Icon Comics, the Marvel Comics imprint for creator-owned work, began publishing Criminal to supplement Ed Brubaker’s and Sean Phillips’s mainstream work for the company. The pair had previously collaborated on Sleeper (2003-2005), which blended superheroics, noir, and espionage. Criminal began as an ongoing series that ran for ten issues. After a hiatus, the series launched a second volume that ran for seven longer issues. The duo then began a new limited series, Incognito (2008- ), and alternated between it and two further limited runs of Criminal. According to interviews with Brubaker and Phillips, future series of Criminal will continue to alternate with others of their creator-owned projects in different genres.

Despite the existence of Criminal collections, the mostly uncollected back matter in the single issues—such as interviews and articles about crime films, television shows, and novels—encourages readers to purchase the issues. The articles feature illustrations by Phillips and are written by Brubaker and his friends, including writers Jason Aaron, Steven Grant, Joe Hill, Tom Piccirilli, and Duane Swierczynski. The back matter has become one of the most popular aspects of the series and has turned Criminal into a de facto crime-fiction minimagazine.

Plot

Brubaker and Phillips’s Criminal accommodates a wide variety of crime and noir story patterns and archetypes in a universe free of the costumes and superpowers present in most of their other noir-influenced work. Criminal’s overarching story builds slowly, with each story arc standing on its own. These arcs are deeply interrelated, with numerous references to past and future details of the universe and to minor characters who become protagonists in later stories. Much remains to be revealed about the central story of Criminal, but it concerns two generations of professional thieves operating out of Bay City (the moniker detective writer Raymond Chandler used for Santa Monica, though the city in Criminal is modeled more on San Francisco).

Coward depicts the traditional story of a heist gone wrong, as a group of crooked police officers and former associates coerce Leo Patterson into helping them plan the robbery of blood diamonds from a police transport van bringing them to court as evidence. In reality, the cops work for a drug dealer and want the uncut heroin being transported in the van. The cops and a former partner of Leo betray him and the rest of the thieves. Leo and Greta Watson escape with the heroin. Despite the great lengths to which he goes to avoid violence, Leo decides to retaliate against the drug dealer and the dealer’s associates. This retaliation lands Leo in prison.

Lawless serves as a revenge story for Tracy Lawless, the older brother of Leo’s childhood friend, Ricky. Tracy finds out about his brother’s murder and deserts the Army in order to infiltrate his brother’s crew of thieves as a wheelman. Tracy has been mostly forgotten and assumes an alias (a nod to the pseudonyms of crime writer Donald Westlake, whose remorseless thief Parker is an avowed model for Tracy). Ricky’s old crew plans a mysterious Christmas Eve heist, and Tracy helps them in the preparations, resulting in a heist in every issue of the story line. Tracy murders and tortures his way through the crew to learn the hard truth about his brother’s murder, but he discovers he has killed all the wrong people for it. The aftermath of his actions leaves Tracy working to pay debts incurred by himself and his brother to syndicate boss Sebastian Hyde.

Through three stand-alone stories providing multiple perspectives, The Dead and the Dying concerns a heist in the early 1970’s. The first story tells about the end of Gnarly Brown and Sebastian’s friendship and the origins of the Hyde family’s power from the partnership between their fathers, Clevon and Walter. The second introduces Teeg Lawless and shows how he began working for Sebastian after returning from Vietnam. The third story explains the motivations of Danica Briggs, whose death readers have already seen.

Bad Night shifts to another second-generation criminal, Jake Kurtz, whose parents worked with Leo’s and Tracy’s. Jake reformed after marrying Sebastian’s niece, but he is continually drawn back into crime. An insomniac who often walks the city at night, he finds himself ensnared by a beautiful redhead named Iris and her volatile boyfriend. This story uses the classic formula of a romantic triangle leading to murder, as popularized by crime writer James Cain, and adds in an unreliable narrator, a technique reminiscent of the work of Jim Thompson.

The Sinners returns to Tracy, a year after the events of Lawless. The worst hit man imaginable, Tracy only executes people he thinks deserve it. In frustration, Sebastian assigns him to search for the person responsible for the deaths of several organized-crime figures in the city. Tracy is not much of a detective, but he beats and stumbles his way into the truth behind the killings, which are motivated by a grotesque vigilantism. The volume ends with Tracy trapped in a different, even more guilt-ridden situation than at the end of Lawless.

Volumes

•Coward (2007). Collects issues 1-5, featuring Leo dealing with the aftermath of a heist gone wrong.

•Lawless (2007). Collects issues 6-10, featuring Tracy infiltrating Ricky’s old crew to avenge Ricky’s murder.

•The Dead and the Dying (2008). Collects issues 1-3 of Volume 2, featuring a triptych perspective on a 1970’s heist.

•Criminal: Deluxe Edition (2009). Collects the contents of the first three trade paperbacks and previously uncollected material, including a preview for the series that appeared in Walking Dead, issue 30; the backup prose story “Caught in the Undertow” and backup essays by Brubaker; Phillips’s art for the backups; and the story “No One Rides for Free” from Image Comics’ The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Presents: Liberty Comics, issue 1.

•Bad Night (2009). Collects issues 4-7 of Volume 2, featuring Jake, an insomniac and former counterfeiter, unwillingly taking part in a heist.

•The Sinners (2010). Collects Criminal: The Sinners, issues 1-5, featuring Tracy investigating murders for Sebastian.

Characters

•Leopold “Leo” Patterson is the protagonist of the first arc, Coward, and two planned, forthcoming arcs. Leo ekes out a living as a pickpocket, reluctant to participate in heists, despite his genius for planning them and escaping from them if they fail. Most associates believe Leo is a coward afraid of prison and violence, but Leo’s hesitance comes from a fear of releasing his demons.

•Ivan is young Leo’s guardian after his father’s imprisonment. By the first arc, he is a heroin addict with Alzheimer’s disease, dependent on the care of Leo and private nurses. Despite his condition, Ivan remains an adept pickpocket and groper.

•Greta Watson is the widow of Leo’s partner, Terry. Greta is a recovering addict and the single mother of a sick child. She persuades Leo to plan a heist, despite his misgivings.

•Jacob “Gnarly” Brown is a supporting character in several stories and a protagonist in the third arc. He is a mob enforcer’s son whose boxing career ended because of a love triangle. He runs The Undertow, and despite the bar’s reputation as a neutral site for criminals, Gnarly aids friends such as Leo and Mallory.

•Tommy Patterson is Leo’s father and the leader of a crew of thieves. He died after being imprisoned for the murder of Teeg Lawless. He and his partner, Ivan, trained Leo.

•Detective Jenny Waters is the daughter of members of Tommy’s crew but works as an Internal Affairs investigator. Despite her pariah status with both the police and the underworld, she remains friends with Leo and Tracy.

•Sergeant Tracy Lawless, a.k.a. Sam West, is the protagonist of the second and fifth arcs. Tracy is a deadly special-forces deserter with a hatred for abusers of women. He infiltrates his brother’s crew in order to find out who murdered Ricky. In doing so, he incurs a debt to Sebastian and must work it off as his hit man.

•Broderick M. “Ricky” Lawless is Tracy’s younger brother, who, unlike Tracy, admired his father. Like his father, he worked as a thief, until his violent alcoholism and instability caused one of his partners to murder him.

•Sebastian Hyde is the son of the city’s syndicate boss and former best friends with Gnarly in the third arc, set during the 1970’s. By the present day, he has inherited his father’s position and is the richest man in the city.

•Jacob “Jake” Kurtz is a supporting character in the second arc and the protagonist in the fourth. His parents were a part of Tommy’s crew, and he was a counterfeiter before marrying Sebastian’s niece. His wife disappeared under suspicious circumstances, leading the police to persecute him and Chester to cripple him. He is an insomniac and the artist of the Frank Kafka PI strip. He is often suborned against his will to produce fake IDs.

•Frank Kafka PI is the private detective who appears in Jake’s comic strip throughout the series. He is a decisive, two-fisted man of action but often finds himself buffeted by existential confusion.

•Mallory is Ricky’s former on-again, off-again girlfriend. She takes up with Tracy when he joins her crew as a wheelman.

•Danica Briggs is a protagonist of the third arc, set during the 1970’s. She is a young woman involved in a love triangle and a heist. The fallout from these events has grave personal consequences for her and Gnarly.

•Teegar “Teeg” Lawless is a protagonist of the third arc. He is a Vietnam veteran and the abusive, alcoholic father of Tracy and Ricky. He works for Sebastian and with Tommy’s crew until his murder in 1989.

•Iris, a.k.a. Nurse Nancy, is a former dancer and nurse who manipulates Jake.

•Detective Max Starr is the investigator assigned to Jake’s wife’s disappearance. He tries to beat the truth out of Jake. Jake parodies him in the Frank Kafka strip as Detective Wrong.

•Elaine Hyde is the much younger and dissatisfied wife of Sebastian. Their son, Damian, has cancer.

•Sabrina Hyde is Sebastian’s rebellious teenage daughter from a previous marriage, estranged from her stepmother.

•Special Agent Yocum is an Army officer sent to the city to retrieve a valuable deserter, Tracy.

Artistic Style

Criminal is set in the traditional layout of three rows of panels per page with between one and four panels per row. Phillips has stated that he wants Criminal to be accessible to the non-comics-reading audience, so he pares down and simplifies his style. Phillips does not pencil pages, instead using a blue marker to make an underdrawing and then filling in the rest of the details with inks. These minimalist yet evocative artistic choices suggest the qualities of cinematic sleaziness the story requires. Val Staples’s colors not only evoke mood but also highlight contrasts in light and among the characters.

Despite Criminal’s intentional simplifications, the art often has experimental qualities. Frank Kafka begins to interject himself into the narrative of Bad Night, and Phillips draws Frank in a cartoonish newspaper style that contrasts with the grimy detail of the rest of his art. Staples occasionally abandons realism in Bad Night, creating a completely red background in instances of violence. In the many flashbacks to Tracy’s childhood, Phillips paints and draws with a ballpoint pen to give the past an alien feel. In the frequent chronological jumps in the opening story of The Dead and the Dying, Staples’s colors mark the abrupt transitions. Criminal sometimes uses an all-black panel and an intertitle to show a transition in the story. In the second part of The Dead and the Dying, these black interpanels become a manifestation of Teeg’s alcoholic blackouts. Phillips’s and Staples’s art is unobtrusive enough to allow for a straightforward reading of the crime narratives but simultaneously experiments with style and technique.

Themes

The major thematic concerns of Criminal are the effects of the violent actions of the past on the characters in the present. Leo explains to Greta in issue 3 that he avoids violence because it creates “a ripple effect.” The reason that Leo succumbed to violence in 1989 and killed his best friend’s father seems to be the major story Criminal will eventually tell. In the meantime, most protagonists in Criminal struggle with guilt and pain stemming from past violence. Tracy fears becoming like his father, even as he inherits his father’s job as a hit man. Tracy differentiates himself from Teeg by reacting violently against the abusers of woman. Teeg’s and Tracy’s violent tendencies predate their military service, but their tours in Vietnam, Bosnia, and Iraq have further immersed them in killing. The guilt Leo, Tracy, Gnarly, and Jake experience over the results of their actions borders on the masochistic and even suicidal, and most Criminal stories end with the protagonists severely injured, having almost died.

Concurrent with the violent past, Criminal portrays the culmination of cycles of abuse. The main example of this is Ricky, who is repeatedly described as a sweet kid, but through his father’s example and physical abuse becomes as unstable and violent against those close to him as his father had been. Along these lines, Criminal attempts to revise the tradition in crime fiction of dangerous women drawing men to their deaths. Greta, Mallory, Danica, Iris, and Elaine look like traditional “babes” of male escapist fiction, but these women retain the agency and desirability of dangerous woman while being portrayed sympathetically. Male violence has affected almost all of these women, and their relationships with the protagonists cost them more than even the most masochistic of their male partners.

Criminal’s cast is dominated by white and black characters, and The Dead and the Dying takes on issues of race explicitly. That story shows the impossibility of Gnarly and Sebastian remaining friends as they grow older and as Sebastian decides to follow the path of his father, who has power and a superior class position. Despite Sebastian and Gnarly’s professions of friendship and closeness, their relationship and the similar one between their fathers have uncomfortable implications, as powerful white men command the violence of their black subordinates. Both Gnarly’s willingness to step aside so that Sebastian can have Danica and Walter Hyde’s command for Clevon to deal violently with Danica, pregnant with his grandchild, demonstrate white male sexual privilege.

Impact

Criminal is arguably one of the most realistic major American crime comics, lacking the over-the-top, cartoonish violence of Sin City, the extended fantasy sequences of Stray Bullets, and the labyrinthine conspiracies of 100 Bullets. Thus, Criminal shifts American crime comics away from the continuing influence of superheroes. In terms of publishing, the creators of Criminal resist the move to a market dominated by trade paperbacks and encourage the purchase of single issues through the inclusion of extra content in the back of the singles. This back matter has become so popular that the expansion of Criminal after the first hiatus was done in part to provide room for two backup features an issue.

Demonstrating an increase in the popularity of crime comics, Criminal’s success has contributed to the launch of several publishing ventures, including the Vertigo Crime subimprint of DC Comics and a Marvel Comics alternate universe called Marvel Noir. Publishers such as Dark Horse Comics, Fantagraphics Books, IDW Publishing, and Running Press have also begun to translate European crime comics for the American market and release anthologies of crime comics.

Further Reading

Azzarello, Brian, and Eduardo Risso. 100 Bullets (1999-2009).

Díaz Canales, Juan, and Juanjo Gaurnido. Blacksad (2010).

Lapham, David. Stray Bullets (1995- ).

Bibliography

Benton, Mike. Crime Comics: An Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor, 1993.

Lindenmuth, Brian. “The Fall (and Rise) of the Crime Comic.” Mulholland Books, December 14, 2010. http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/2010/12/14/a-history-of-and-appreciation-for-crime-comics.

Phillips, Sean. “Criminal Week: Sean Philips Interviewed by Michael Lark!” Interview by Michael Lark. MySpace Comic Books, February 1, 2008. http://www.myspace.com/comicbooks/blog/353739484?‗‗preferredculture=en-US&‗‗ipculture=en-US.