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The sins of the fathers are passed down as Volume Two begins!

I love “Brubaker Week”. This is the week that I refer to when both Captain America and Daredevil come out the same week. And that was this week. But as a special super added bonus, we also got Criminal Vol. 2 #1 this week as well! Criminal may just very well be the best crime comic in the last several years. The first really great one in the last 20 or so years was Frank Miller’s creation of Sin City. It’s immensely entertaining reading with great art and fantastically fun anti-heroes and horrific villains. Gritty and hyper-violent, Sin City lasts long after you’re finished reading it. But with all the superhuman feats pulled off by the protagonists and its super-stylized dialogue and art, I knew that it was not trying to have the gritty realism of the pulp novels of the 40’s and 50’s that, for a while, were my bread and butter. When 100 Bullets first came out, I thought that this was a great concept and Brian Azzarello was such a great writer, and the stories were so dark and violent and gritty that it was going to be the end-all be-all of crime comics. But then it started getting bogged down in the more high-concept mythology of the series with rogue agents and conspiracies and the like, and I started quickly tuning out. Then in Aught Six came Criminal. And I knew that at last the crime novels that I’d been reading (particularly from one of the best writers to have ever lived: Jim Thompson) had a real heir. Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips have made Criminal so dark and grim and cold that you can feel the chill coming off each page. This series is so tremendously noir that it makes films like “Murder, My Sweet” and the original “Kiss of Death” seem like Disney films.

In the first issue of Vol. 2, we open with a dark cold night in 1954 where two mobsters, Walter Hyde and Clevon Brown, are in a field where Clevon is about to put a bullet into Hyde’s brain. Hyde pleads for his life and lays out a plan for the future that includes Clevon becomes something more than just a low-level enforcer. Apparently a deal is struck and the two men take over the city’s syndicate from the ‘old guard’ via an extremely bloody coup d’etat. Then we go forward to 1972 where the 2 sons of these men, Sebastian Hyde and Jake ‘Gnarly’ Brown, are best friends. Sebastian is determined to take over for his father, whereas Jake just wants to be a boxer and get away from that life. It’s when a woman comes between them that all hell breaks loose for these two friends. Before too long, someone is dead, and someone else is going to be looking for revenge. I’d say more, but I don’t want to spoil anything.

We see some familiar places here, like The Undertown, and although it takes place 24 years before the first chapter, you’re hooked right back into this familiar dark and cruel world. Brubaker keeps things at a very intimate level while keeping the pacing even and the characters fresh. Phillips does a fantastic job of keeping the atmosphere that made “Coward” and “Lawless” so successful in his beautifully-rendered art. Criminal has consistently been one of the best comics out there since its inception and now with this new arc, it’s already shaping up to be a real killer. These guys have an almost-obsessive lust for noir films and pulp crime novels, and that love permeates every page of every issue.

One of the other things I love about this comic is at the end of every issue, there’s an essay on a particular classic crime novel or film that, if it’s a film, usually ends up in my Netflix queue and if it’s a book, then I try my damnedest to find it.

The only real crime here would be you not collecting this great title.

Criminal Vol.2 #1
“Second Chance In Hell: Part One”
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art and Letters by Sean Phillips
Colors by Val Staples

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