“As he came into the window, it was a sound of a crescendo; he came into her apartment, he left the bloodstains on the carpet”
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are back, as they often are, with Five Gears in Reverse, “a Criminal book,” which is colored by Jacob Phillips. 
You can get a fancy hardcover from Image for $24.99, and you get 125 pages of lawless (and Lawless) goodness!
(Ok, before we start, what’s up with the hooker? She’s clearly looking for something, but she brushes it off when our guy Ricky catches her, and then we never see her again. What’s up, Hooker Lady? WHAT’S UP?!?!?)
One thing that’s always been impressive about Criminal is not that Brubaker can make kind of horrible people compelling — lots of writers can do that, or we wouldn’t have crime fiction at all! — but how he can make such stupid people compelling. This entire book is Ricky Lawless doing incredibly stupid things and not only surviving, but Brubaker makes us want him to survive, even though this reader, in particular, was almost yelling “Why are you so stupid?!?!?” at the pages as he was reading them. Ricky makes almost every wrong choice he could in this book, yet he manages to survive, and Brubaker is so good at writing these horrible characters that we give a bit of cheer when it all works out for him. Listen, in the real world he’d almost certainly be dead, but, I mean, we have incredibly stupid people running our country right now, so maybe he’d thrive (of course, Ricky doesn’t have the advantage of being fabulously wealthy, which is why so many stupid people can get away with being stupid, but maybe he’d get lucky in the real world too?), but in the Criminal world, he gets lucky time after time, and it all works out. 
The biggest problem I have with this book is Ricky’s stupidity, actually, because he’s so aware that most of the things he does are stupid, but he does them anyway. The inciting event is just him being stupid — he goes to the wrong hotel for his heist — but, I mean, he doesn’t have to snort cocaine (which turns out to be heroin) while he’s waiting for his victim to come back to the room, does he? He doesn’t have to let the lawyer he’s retrieving for the crime boss get under his skin, but he does, because he’s stupid. That he survives is down to Mallory, his girlfriend, who’s far smarter than he is and is clever enough to use her womanly wiles against stupid men (Ricky is not the only stupid person in this book, to be sure, so I guess one of the stupid people has to survive!). Brubaker, as he always does, weaves this twisted, wicked tale that leaves several people dead and a Lawless alive at the end. There’s just not a lot to say about Criminal — it’s excellent, it’s been excellent for two decades, and it will probably continue to be excellent. Do I want Brubillips to do more standalone stories or more Reckless books? Yes, of course, but, I mean, they’re still really good at the Criminal books, so I really don’t have anything to complain about.
In the same vein, what is there to say about the law office of Phillips and Phillips? 
Phillips creates all these interesting looking people — all of whom just look like regular folks — and then puts them through the wringer, and Phillips v2.0 does that marvelous coloring job, with the blurred edges and the oddly placed geometric shapes. We always get excellent storytelling from Phillips, as he always has a great sense of where the action is occurring and how the characters would navigate that space. He doesn’t go nuts with unusual camera angles and whatnot, but our POV always has the maximum effect for whatever he’s trying to do. He’s one of those artists who, if you just glance at his art, you might think he’s just “workmanlike,” but when you start to look at it, it becomes clear that he’s a master at manipulating the page and, through that, our response to the script. You smart people know all this, of course, because, unlike Ricky Lawless, you’re not stupid, but I just thought I’d mention it every once in a while. Phillips and Phillips — “they’ll get money for you!” — are a really good team, and they make Brubaker’s words work very well. We can almost forgive Ricky’s stupidity because of the visual ordeal Phillips shows him going through!
It’s a Criminal book. I and many others have only been hyping it for 20 years! What’s it going to take to get you on the bandwagon?!?!?
[Obviously, I wrote this before the accusations against Brubaker came out, but if that’s a deal-breaker for you, so be it. I have never allowed that to get too in the way of what I buy, because if we boycotted everything that was done by a douchebag, we’d never consume any art or entertainment. But yes, someone accused Brubaker of being a douchebag, possibly a criminal one, because this world sucks.]
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
