My dossier on Ed Brubaker

I'm starting to get a line on Ed Brubaker, the celebrated writer of such crime comics as Criminal, The Fade-Out, and Velvet:

1) Brubaker works with some terrific artist/illustrators: Sean Phillips on The Fade Out and Criminal, Steve Epting on Velvet. Those guys get the stories' dark atmosphere down, and they know when an illustration should absorb the reader, and when it should retreat, literally, into the background.

2) Brubaker favors fractured, multiple-viewpoint narrative, and he uses it well.

3) Brubaker has a weakness for melodrama. The works beautifully in The Fade-Out and Velvet, less well in "Lawless," the second story arc in Criminal, where it's a bad fit with the story's emotionless-returning-veteran-bent-on-revenge protagonist. What's the point of dragging out a string on deus ex machina secrets if the protagonist will show no more reaction than burying his head in his hands, and that only once that I can recall?

4) That excess will occasionally find its way into dialogue or narration by female characters, in lines like "Do even see me at all?" — soap-opera stuff, and not in a good way.

5) Brubaker and his editors appear not to know the difference between phase and faze and to think that "I won't argue that..." means "I won't disagree..." *

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* "I certainly won't argue that betrayal is a big part of the story, for sure. One of the things that I really wanted to write about [in Velvet]  was the way espionage agencies use and discard assets and operatives... " 

(It appears that "argue"in the sense that Brubaker uses is, meaning "to disagree with," is not sanctioned by Merriam-Webster, which means that I'm right. But this week I found a third example of its use in that sense. One was from an American novel of the 1950s, which suggests the usage might be older or outmoded. That followed an example from the work of one of the worst writers I have ever come across in my professional life. This suggests the usage might be substandard.  )

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Brubaker and Phillips' Criminal: Melodrama / no melodrama

I've just read Lawless, the second story arc of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal series, and I found it a good deal less satisfying than the same pair's The Fade-Out, which I have also read recently. Why is this the case?

1) Despite what Brubaker seems to think, it's not "... death didn't phase him" and "Things that did, in fact, phase him," but rather faze and faze. How does a mistake like that get past Brubaker, his editors, and the letterer?

2) Lawless' melodrama—and the story is full of family secrets and deus ex machina revelations—is a poor match with the emotionless killing machine that the protagonist is supposed to be. The occasional melodrama of The Fade-Out was a much better fit for its story's setting in that mid-century melodrama factory, late-1940s Hollywood. Even the two examples of trite, overheated language I remember from The Fade-Out might well be deliberate nods to the melodramatic Hollywood movies of the era that were later called film noir.

Or maybe I give Brubaker too much credit. Maybe, for all his facility with fractured, non-linear narrative and evocative, morally dubious settings, he's just not a great prose stylist.

3) More to come if I can gather my thoughts about why Lawless seems like an ungainly combination of melodrama, Parker-like heist story, and revenge tale. If I'm right that such a mix was Brubaker's intention, then the mix doesn't come together here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2016