As much as Ed Brubaker’s work can be hit-and-miss for me, he remains one of those writers – like Garth Ennis or Warren Ellis – whose comics I always end up checking out, sooner or later. For one thing, their books tend to be pretty damn readable, in a ‘comfort food’ sort of way. But it’s more than that: even if I don’t love all these authors do, I feel like I get where they’re coming from and it’s interesting to see their latest take on familiar motifs.
For instance, Brubaker keeps going back to the culture he consumed in his youth and reimagining it through older eyes, with a more mature sensibility and characterization.
One of the most satisfying of Ed Brubaker’s regular collaborations with artist Sean Phillips has been a series of graphic novels about the exploits of Ethan Reckless (yep), a badass Vietnam vet whom people hire to solve their problems (usually through violence) when they can’t go to the authorities. Brubaker has presented this as a throwback to the John D. MacDonald-style pulp novels he read growing up, with their lurid painted covers and cool thrillers about manly adventurers, criminals, spies, and private eyes.
The premise certainly feels like an adolescent fantasy: working without a boss and only when he feels like it, in his downtime Ethan Reckless is a surfer who lives in an abandoned movie theater where he gets to watch his favorite classics on the big screen. The setting of 1970s-80s’ California likewise feels informed by nostalgia… which is not to say that Reckless posits a rose-tinted view of the era. Rather, the books fully embrace those decades’ bleaker, seedier elements, from the rise of skinheads and CIA’s dirty ops all the way to predatory real estate deals and post-hippie cults.
Friend of the Devil
Although sharing a neo-noir style and story beats, each book has its own identity. The second volume, Friend of the Devil, is a Chandleresque detective story in Hollywood, which is something Brubaker excels at. The third one, Destroy All Monsters, despite the bombastic title, is more of a low-key character study about friendship. And if that one fleshes out the character of Ethan Reckless’ punk assistant Anna, she effectively becomes the protagonist of the fourth book, The Ghost In You, which is a mystery yarn with hints of weird horror. And then came Follow Me Down, a devastating take on the woman-on-a-vengeful-rampage subgenre (with obligatory nods to Hannie Caulder and The Bride Wore Black) against the backdrop of a San Francisco still recovering from the 1989 earthquake.
Thanks to Brubillips’ dependable, confident storytelling (developed over twenty-plus years of collaboration), every single one of these has been a treat. Sure, there are still the occasional condescending passages (like when Ethan explains directly to the reader that he’s looking at microfiches because there weren’t digital cameras or laptops back in the 1980s), but I’ve even come to accept the overexplanatory inner monologues (which make every motivation explicit) as just another form of narrative clarity and comfort.
Reckless
Hell, after a while, this just becomes part of Ethan Reckless’ personality – it’s is just how he thinks, constantly justifying his actions. And the framing devise (for the most part, at least) is that Ethan is writing his memoirs in the 21st century, so I can see the tendency to oldmansplain as coherent with his authorial voice.
Moreover, as it’s often the case, what helps sell these books is Sean Phillips’ efficient, unflashy artwork. Although the word-heavy storytelling doesn’t leave much room for visually driven action, Brubaker wisely relies on Phillips to set the right the mood – which he consistently nails, in part due the addition to the team of colorist Jacob Phillips, with his knack of evoking Los Angeles’ peculiar light (especially in the beautiful surfing scenes), just as he did for Texas in That Texas Blood (an absolute must-read for fans of Criminal and Reckless).
This creative trio reunited for an unconnected project, the standalone graphic novel Night Fever, but there my praise is more uneven. Brubaker was hardly in top form, penning a derivative Eyes Wide Shut-ish midlife-crisis narrative about a family man on a business trip to Paris who gets involved in a nighttime adventure where he gets to act out stereotypical male fantasies (recently, you could find a much more ingenious spin on this type of tale in Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool). In turn, the two Phillips outdid themselves, bringing to life an eerie atmosphere that is suitably enigmatic, nightmarish, and erotic.
Night Fever
The other great duo who has been working with Ed Brubaker are artist Marcos Martín and colorist Muntsa Vicente, his collaborators on Friday, a series about a couple of former child detectives – now in their late teens – who get involved an atypically violent case.
The artwork in this one is particularly lovely. On top of some inventive page layouts, the delicate designs and wintery palette capture a certain sense of fading innocence and quaint small-town life, both evoking the gentle milieu of the likes of Encyclopedia Brown and imbuing it with a newfound melancholia. This creates the perfect balance for Brubaker to engage with the emergence of more mature and conflicted feelings…
Friday #1
Not that you need much intertextual baggage to appreciate Friday… Even if you’ve never read the sort of mysteries the series is riffing on, the comic does a solid job of establishing the premise and character types as it follows an intriguing investigation (with a supernatural flavor).
That said, this is a series about growing up and the metafictional element does enhance its thematic strength. Ed Brubaker has called Friday post-YA fiction, in that it involves bringing adult themes into YA concepts (or, as a librarian reader has pointed out in the letters section, ‘middle grade’ rather than ‘young adult’ concepts). In that sense, it is a return to the gesture he did in the Criminal arc ‘The Last of the Innocent’ – and something that a number of other creators have had a stab at in recent times (none of them more hilariously than John Allison in Wicked Things).
Because Friday is a Brubaker comic, though, growing up doesn’t just mean handling more responsibilities and becoming more aware of the world’s complexity. It means shit will get dark.
Friday #2