Review
CRIMINAL # 9 Lawless Part Four
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Art: Sean Phillips
This book just won the Eisner Award for Best Writer and Best New Series, and with good reason, so I figure now is a good time to review an issue to remind those of you who might have lived in a cave this year that this book is absolutely must read. The book is Noir stories, each arc with different protagonists and wholly self contained. Think of this as a more reality based Sin City with better characters.
This is mid-arc. Tracy Lawless, an army man of numerous skills, has gone underground to join his recently deceased kid brother’s gang. He wants to know how and why his brother was killed and to seek revenge as necessary. Naturally, the gang has a heist, but can he fill the heist, find out the truth, and handle his new love interest before the gang finds out who he is or the army catches up to him? The tension is palpable and the plot slowly unravels, as does Tracy.
Tracy is a remarkably competent character, taking any number of huge, foolish risks in the name of family honor. He is clearly a character who is making mistakes here, but that only adds to the interest as he clearly isn’t aware he’s setting himself in a trap. In Gaiman’s Sandman a character once noted (and I’m paraphrasing here) “We set our own traps, backing into them and pretending astonishment all the while.†Well, that’s exactly the feeling one gets from Tracy.
One would think that this would lead for disdain for Tracy, but he’s handled fairly honorably for a man in a criminal endeavor, and besides his love interest, seems the most on the up-and-up character in the series. That means that although an unlikely protagonist, he’s easy to root for. Flashbacks to a clearly traumatic childhood also serve to flesh out his character and present the motivation for a good deal of his mistakes in this arc.
The art is, as you’d expect from a noir book, gorgeously simple, with heavy use of shadow and ink to convey the mood and tone of the series. The facial expressions here are amazing. There’s a lot conveyed by looks here and if you’re a reader who focuses only on text, you’re guaranteed to miss a lot. Study this book’s art; the interaction between art and text in this medium is perfectly represented in this book.
Overall, this book is great. I’m scoring it based on the entire arc, not just this issue, however, as this is not at all stand alone. The first issue in the arc is #6 and I strongly urge you to get it and all before and thereafter. Criminal is an instant classic.
