Breaking All the Rules

The crime genre is well trod ground at this point. Practically since pulp novels became a thing there were tales of good guys and bad guys, and those morally aligned somewhere in the middle. Big crimes, little crimes, crosses and double-crosses. The genre had so much fertile material that could be covered, and those stories led to other stories, which created their own series and so on. Pulp gave way to radio, and then to television, and the crime genre never really went away, it just found different forms to take, evolving with the eras to represent something new each time.

Criminal feels like a throwback to that kind of story, one specifically set to analyze the genre as a whole and poke at what makes it tick. Not really a Noir (although you could easily see a Noir tale fitting into the universe), the comic series Criminal feels more like it’s specifically calling out the tropes of the crime genre and then answering its own points, creating something new that still feels like it’s part of the down, dirty, gritty, and grimy world of the crime genre. It’s a series that knows exactly how to tie itself into the expectations of the reader while providing something new and interesting as well.

Created by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (with coloring by Val Staples, Elizabeth Breitweiser, and Jacob Phillips across the various volumes), the series started back in 2006 and has been running, off and on, ever since. It’s a creator-owned comic, allowing the creative team to work on the book only when they have ideas and a story to tell. The series never feels forced or straining, finding its own pace and schedule to keep. That’s what helps to keep it fresh and interesting, a read you don’t want to put down once you’ve picked it up, especially since it might be months (or sometimes years) between issues and volumes.

The series kicked off with “Coward”, a tale about Leo Patterson. Five years prior to the start of the story there was the “Salt Bay Job”, a bank robbery that Leo was part of, a job that went south. Leo was the only one of the gang to get away, all because he had contingencies planned and alternate routes he could take. By his own rules Leo never went into a job without ways to escape it after just in case everything went tits up, and in the case of the Salt Bay Job, that’s exactly what happened. Leo ran, as he frequently did when jobs looked sketchy, and that day he gained the reputation as a “coward”, one that would run at the first sign of trouble.

But the thing is that Leo was also smart. He saw all the angles, he planned everything well in advance. He was the brains of any outfit he went into, and if he said something wasn’t right you needed to listen to him. Unfortunately for Leo he was forced to join with a new robbery as a favor to an old, dead associate. When two cops come sniffing around, they strongarm Leo into helping them rob an armored truck so they can steal a case full of diamonds. Except the contents of the case isn’t diamonds, it’s cocaine, and the second Leo realizes what’s happening he makes for his escape route. This puts him on the run with the only associate he can trust, his ex-associate’s wife Greta, and the two have to find a way to get themselves out of this mess before they both wind up dead.

Right from the get-go Criminal makes it clear that this isn’t a story for everyone. If you need an adventure with clear good guys and bad guys, Criminal isn’t it. The paraphrase the words of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine from Thunderbolts*, there are bad guys and there are worse guys. Leo isn’t a good guy by any stretch of the imagination. He’s a thief, a pick-pocket, a con man. He does what he has to in the service of his own ends and he doesn’t really care what a crime takes so long as he can get away and get paid. He does have some morals, like not killing if he doesn’t have to, but by and large he seems like he’d do just about anything if it meant a solid pay day.

The whole reason he doesn’t want to do the armored truck job is more because of how sketchy it seems and how poorly his last job went. He’s managed to eke out a niche for himself stealing wallets and doing other petty crimes, keeping his nose down so he doesn’t get noticed. But a good job, with a safe score, does seem like something he’d take if the money were right. The armored truck job doesn’t feel right to him, so he walks. That’s why the police use Greta so she can guilt Leo into the gig. She forced him to break some of his rules, and once those rules break, more rules go as well.

But in comparison to Leo, the two cops, Seymour and Jeff, are dirty as they come. Jeff even has ties to a drug running operation, which is why he needs to have the case stolen from a police armored truck. Those drugs were supposed to be on the streets, not in police lockup, and if the case made it across town to court as evidence it would put up one of the men loyal to the drug kingpin, Roy-L. Jeff is willing to do whatever it takes to get the drugs back, including killing other cops, and Leo is there to act as the patsy, the fall guy for this dirty little operation. Jeff is the is worse guy to Leo’s bad guy.

That’s why we can root for Leo even though we don’t really like him. Leo is very much a morally grey character, one that in some other story would act as the antagonist of the tale. Here, though, he’s the protagonist because he has to find his path through this dirty life and see if, just maybe, there’s some kind of hope for him at the end of it all. Maybe he gets out alive, maybe he doesn’t, but redeeming himself in his own eyes (as well as maybe the eyes of Gretta) might be enough to justify whatever actions he has to take in the end.

“Coward” is told fantastically by Brubaker and Phillips. The story never feels rushed or like it’s trying to get ahead of himself. The pacing, even with flashbacks to prior events, also feels on the mark, moving the story right where it needs to be as it needs to be there. It’s tight and taunt, letting us learn all about the characters without it ever feeling forced. There’s enough nuance, enough world building, to make Criminal feel alive and lived in, all while still keeping the story moving at a steady clip so the audience never gets bored.

And it is a rich world. There are enough little moments, threads and scenes dropped along the way that creative narrative areas that could be explored again later. A bar where criminals meet that acts as neutral ground. An Internal Affairs detective working to clean up the filth within her own department. Stories of criminals long past and scores gone bad. You can easily see how other stories could be built in this world, creating a rich tapestry of tales that all connect in this dark and dirty city that acts as the central hub of Criminal.

“Coward” is a fantastic first shot for the series, launching Criminal with aplomb. It’s richly detailed and surprisingly nuanced, all while giving us a gritty story of crimes and violence, bad guys and worse guys. It’s not for everyone, but anyone with a passing interest in the crime genre will find plenty to sink their teeth into here. And, thankfully, there are many more stories set in the universe, released in the years after. We’ll cover them all, a volume at a time, as these reviews continue.