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

The Fade-Out, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and DBB meets Repairman Jack

1) The Fade-Out, Act One, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Terrific, atmospheric, shadow-drenched art, and a story that's noir at its helpless, claustrophobic, desperate, Goodis-like best. Like Scalped, its only rival as the best noir comic I've read. The Fade-Out is peppered with tributes to the genre its creators love so well. A movie-studio mogul has the same last name as The Maltese Falcon's Floyd Thursby, and if The Fade-Out's perky, bespectacled studio publicity girl, Dottie Quinn, is not a tribute to Dorothy Malone's bookstore owner in The Big Sleep, I deserve to spend the rest of my life scraping black paint off bogus falcons.

2) The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, attributed to Luo Guanzhong. This massive Chinese classic is both a swashbuckling adventure story and a handy introduction to the tumultuous Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history that attended the decline of the Han dynasty (Think of it as Western Europe from the break-up of the Roman Empire to the emergence of national states.)  It's also a fascinating lesson in the mercurial nature of political alliances, and thus it may make one contemplate the messy nature of state-formation. No wonder it has been a classic for 500 years or more.

F. Paul Wilson

3) Quick Fixes: Tales of Repairman Jack, by F. Paul Wilson. This collection of short stories is my first experience with Wilson's urban fixer Repairman Jack.  Wilson's introduction goes out of its way to say Jack "is not a vigilante, not a do-gooder. He's not out to right wrongs. Nor is he out to change the world or fight crime."  So what is a reader to think when, within the first two stories, Jack defends a small businessman against a manipulative drug dealer, beats the crap out of a gangster, and returns a woman's engagement ring that a thug had taken from her? ("She clutched the tiny ring against her with both hands and began to cry.")

Jack is, in those stories at least, manifestly everything that Wilson insists he is not, except that he takes payment for his work.  If Batman is like a gentleman athlete from the amateur-era Olympics, Repairman Jack is a modern-day, professional Olympian. But his goals are exactly the same as Batman's. (His methods can be harsher, reminiscent of Andrew Vachss' Burke. And Vachss, in fact, has said nice things about Repairman Jack.)

4) Oh, and before I forget, Dietrich Kalteis' Off the Cuff blog is back with a discussion among three authors talking about how they deal with rejection. He illustrates this discussion with one of my nourish shots (above/left). I have no idea if the unknown cyclist was an author whose manuscript had just been rejected.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Freeze!

You may have read a crime novel or ten about a psychotic serial killer with a flair for the dramatic who dispatches his victims in grizzly, gory, elaborate, over-the-top ways: crucified, flayed, dismembered with its long bones rearranged to form a pentagram, murdered in groups according to the Fibonnaci series or the list of prime numbers or the harmonic intervals in a Bach prelude.

That sort of thing gets cartoonish after a while, so why not do it in cartoon form in the first place?

That's what writers Ed Brubaker and Greg Rucka and artist Michael Lark do in "In the Line of Duty," first story in the Gotham Central collection, one of very many tales in which Batman has become a problematic figure.

The tale's villain is Dr. Victor Fries — Mr. Freeze — who wears a cryogenic suit to survive and who takes his revenge by freezing victims — nothing if not over the top. In the story's opening scene, Freeze attacks two police who raid an apartment where he's holed up, zapping one with his freeze gun and snapping his brittle torso in two.

Over the top, but it works. Brubaker, Rucka and Lark, creating a dark, realistic story in the traditions both of Batman's post-1986 return to his dark roots and of Ed McBain's group police procedurals, nevertheless manage to accommodate the most extravagant of superpowers and the most fiendishly violent of killings. No way anyone could get away with that in regular, non-comic-book crime fiction without inducing a fit of eye-rolling.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Graphic noir: Scalped, Vol. 4

Ed Brubaker's introduction to the fourth collection of Jason Aaron's comic/graphic novel Scalped offers a definition of noir that passes within hailing distance of my own. Writes Brubaker:

"[G]ood noir often has amazingly intricate twisty plots, but that's just icing on a dark, dark cake. Noir is about the characters moving through those plots, ricocheting like a banged-up pinball that only bounces

"Down

"Down

"Down

"Until — Game over. No match, no free play.

"And as you watch them move, you know their final destination, you recognize it ... because it feels inevitable. To me, that's the heart of what noir is, inevitability."

Your humble blog keeper had this to say when he set his mind to definitions (and that definition came in the introduction to an interview whose subject had yet a third definition of noir):

"For this reader, noir hits me hard in the stomach with an ending in which a protagonist goes knowingly to his or her fate. Call it resignation, even if that resignation is sometimes triumphant."

Scalped occupies a thought-provoking place in such discussions. For one thing, its setting on an Indian reservation helps freshen the noir tradition by keeping it surprising and contemporary. Noir is not a style, it's a way of grim life. For another, it's a kind of group noir. Everyone is trapped or doomed, not just some hapless protagonist.

Having said that, one story in this volume, which collects issues 19 through 24 of the comic, has a prominent character take a series of unexpectedly moral actions. I'd like to say that the character turns away from the noir and toward the heroic, but I won't. Instead, I'll take the story as gratifying evidence of noir's flexibility and vitality.

(Read more about Scalped at publisher Vertigo's Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009