Sometimes writers start hanging out with people, start reading new (to them) writers, or something else (like starting or stopping drinking, marrying or divorcing), and their work changes. Not the obvious content-level stuff, but the lower stuff, the stuff it isn't easy to identify and classify. With Criminal, Ed Brubaker turns in a totally serviceable crime comic. It's got good dialogue, good narration, good art from Sean Phillips, but it isn't breaking down any new doors. It isn't even opening any new doors. It might not even be looking for the light under doors. When I read the first issue, I had just this response--serviceable, unexciting Brubaker-written crime comic--but this time through, reading all the issues of Coward (the first story-line), the second issue kicked my ass. I couldn't believe Brubaker was fitting so much into a single issue. It was beautiful.
But by the time I'd finished the third issue, I almost went straight for the fifth, just because I knew the fourth wasn't going to do anything exciting. Brubaker breaks a lot of “rules” in Criminal, but they're the same dumb rules David Fincher broke in Seven. So, not only are they narratively useless, they've also been broken before. The most exciting thing about Criminal, overall, didn't even pay-off. Brubaker had a comic strip, a la Watchmen, running concurrent to the story, but then he forgot about it. The comic strip in the comic book, even if it was a direct lift from Watchmen, was at least formally exciting. It was something new, because nothing else in Criminal is new. Imagine if Quentin Tarantino, instead of making Pulp Fiction, having only written True Romance and Reservoir Dogs, wrote a comic book. Criminal is about half that comic book, because it concerns itself with looking good in the canon of crime fiction, while Tarantino's only interested in looking good in his own context.
Criminal is not bad, but it's fluff. Very competently written, beautifully drawn, fluff. It's not excited with its own form beyond fitting an existing form and it's not excited with its story--it's full of genre standards and Brubaker's good at disguising them for a while, until an inevitable reveal. The comics are full of quotes from other writers, Brubaker's genre-minded friends (I won't even get into the Rat Pack mentality), and it becomes clear Criminal is meant to fit into a very specific mold. Unfortunately, either forcing it into that mold or writing it in that mold has near suffocated the writing.
Starting Criminal, I fully expected to recommend the trade to a non-comic book reading friend of mine... Nope.
