CANR

• Night Fever Image Comics (Portland, OR), 2023
• Follow Me Down Image Comics (Portland, OR), 2022
• On a Cold Winter's Night Image Comics (Portland, OR), 2022

1. Night fever LCCN 2023297131 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Ed, writer. Main title Night fever / Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips ; colors by Jacob Philips. Published/Produced Portland, OR : Image Comics, Inc., 2023. ©2023 Description 1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations ; 27 cm ISBN 9781534326095 (hardcover) 153432609X (hardcover) 9781534399150 (Indigo Exclusive) 1534399151 (Indigo Exclusive) CALL NUMBER PN6727.B77 N54 2023 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Follow me down : a Reckless book LCCN 2023289467 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Ed, author. Main title Follow me down : a Reckless book / by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips ; colors by Jacob Phillips. Published/Produced Portland, OR : Image Comics, 2022. Description 1 volume (unpaged) : chiefly color illustrations ; 27 cm. ISBN 9781534323421 (hardcover) 1534323422 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PN6728.R425 B77 2022 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 3. On a cold winter's night LCCN 2023275577 Type of material Book Personal name Brubaker, Ed, author. Main title On a cold winter's night / Ed Brubaker & Marcos Martín with Muntsa Vicente. Published/Produced Portland, OR : Image Comics, 2022. Description 120 pages : chiefly illustrations (chiefly color) ; 23 cm. ISBN 9781534324596 (paperback) 1534324593 (paperback) CALL NUMBER PN6728.F6978 B85 2022 FT MEADE Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Destroy All Monsters: A Reckless Book (Ed Brubaker (Author), Sean Phillips (Artist), Jacob Phillips (Artist)) - 2021 Image Comics, Portland, OR
• Ghost in You: A Reckless Book (Ed Brubaker (Author), Sean Phillips (Artist), Jacob Phillips (Artist)) - 2022 Image Comics, Portland, OR
• Where the Body Was (Ed Brubaker (Author), Sean Phillips (Artist), Jacob Phillips (Artist)) - 2024 Image Comics, Portland, OR
• Houses of the Unholy (Ed Brubaker (Author), Sean Phillips (Illustrator), Jacob Phillips (Colorist)) - 2024 Image Comics, Portland, OR

• Gizmodo - https://gizmodo.com/interview-ed-brubaker-comics-noir-captain-america-1851281934

  Comics Writer Ed Brubaker Talks Crime, Drugs, Maps, and Growing Up
  Brubaker's latest collaboration with artist Sean Phillips, Where the Body Was , is out now from Image Comics.
  Zach Rabiroff Published February 23, 2024 | Comments (0)
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  Where the Body Was cover art
  Where the Body Was cover art Image: Image Comics/Simon and Schuster
  If Ed Brubaker is getting tired by now, he isn’t showing it. Twenty-three years after he first teamed up with artist Sean Phillips (on an out-of-continuity Batman noir story called Gotham Noir), the comic writer has been around the block more than few times.

  He found breakout success with his six-year stint writing (and briefly killing) Marvel’s Captain America; co-authored the critically beloved cop drama-by-way-of-DC-Comics series Gotham Central; achieved more breakout success with a six-year stint on Marvel’s Captain America (with one dead protagonist and one resurrected sidekick to show for it); moved for a time into TV scripting as a part of the writer’s room on HBO’s Westworld; and, maybe more than anything else, became a pioneer in successful, sustained creator-owned sales outside the purview of the Big Two superhero publishers.

  Call it a matter of creative harmony. The key unifying factor to the past two decades of Brubaker’s career has been the steady presence of Phillips as artist, co-author, and preternaturally in-sync collaborator. After solid early feedback on their Batman work, the team entered the awareness of fandom at large as the braintrust behind Wildstorm’s Sleeper. But their real key juncture was the launch of 2007’s Criminal, a creator-owned crime anthology series that gave them leave to unapologetically lurk in the shadows of the noir films and musty pulp paperbacks that had always been the source of their inspiration.

  That opened the door to a series of crime-themed, pulp-flavored collaborations that have wound their way through various series, lead characters, publishers, and formats in the decade and a half since then. With their transition wholly into original graphic novels beginning in 2020—a separation from the monthly grind of periodical comics that may or may not be a canary in the coal mine of the comics industry—Brubaker and Phillips did the unthinkable for mainstream comic creators: turned their backs on the traditional direct market and lived to tell the tale. Brubaker likes to joke that he’ll know he’s made it when his comics are sold at airport bookstores. He and Phillips are coming perilously close. Wince at the term if you will (and Brubaker does), but Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are a brand.

  Their latest book, Where the Body Was, is both of a piece with their earlier works, and something grippingly, beautifully new. A spin on the old, and largely forgotten, series of mapback books published by Dell Books in the 1940s (which, as their name implies, were set entirely within the bounds of a map printed with a key on the book’s cover), it’s both a mystery revolving around a dead body and a runaway teen, and an autobiographical reminiscence of misspent California youth in the 1980s. It’s about drugs, and crime, death, and affairs, yes—but it’s also about growing up, and learning what you can control, what you can’t, and which of the two matters more.

  As for Brubaker? He and Phillips are already onto the next book. And the one after that. And the Amazon-produced adaptation of Criminal lately given the go-ahead. And speaking for myself, it’s hard to imagine complaining one bit. Brubaker took the time to sit down with io9 to talk about his new book, crime, maps, California sunshine, and the wisdom of growing up.

  Zach Rabiroff, io9: I hope you won’t mind if I start with an editorial statement. Because I’ve read, I think, every comic that you and Sean Phillips have done together, and I have to say that I think this is the best thing you’ve ever done together. So I guess what I want to ask is, did you feel like you had done something special with this?

  Ed Brubaker: I think everything we do is the best thing we’ve done, generally. Looking back, sometimes I go, “Oh, that one was better than that one,” because we do a couple of books every year at this point. And I realize that everybody has different favorite ones, but for me, this was something that was really unlike anything we’ve done before, but also still felt like us. I felt like that was a real achievement. I’d been trying to find a way to write about love and all its different aspects and facets, and how it changes inside of us over time.

  io9: That’s actually something you’ve been talking about for quite a while. I think it was around the turn of the millennium you first said that you wanted to do a romance book if there was a market for it. And it feels like there’s more to that here than I’ve seen in any other of your work since then.

  Brubaker: Yeah, Chip Zdarsky laughed at me when I showed him the cover to the book [showing the outline of a dead body]. He said, “This is a great cover, but this book has got the most amount of romance and sex in it of anything that you guys have ever done, and you have a dead man on the cover.”

  io9: Do you think that’s just because your and Sean’s brand at this point meant there’s got to be a murder?

  Brubaker: No, it started with the dead body on the street. That was always part of it. It was just that as I was populating my notebook with the stories of all the different characters, I realized that this was going to end up being more of a romance comic than anything, because it’s all these different characters at these different points in their lives, encountering each other on the same street. And to me, it was the closest I could get to trying to wrap my words around the way loss feels, or love feels, or just living on this planet and growing older. A really small epic that took place on one street, basically.

  io9: Was that the genesis, that you wanted to have this contained setting of the one street, and you built it from there?

  Brubaker: Yeah, I’ve been wanting to do something for a long time where we could have a map on either the back cover—like those old Dell mapback books— or what we ended up doing, which is that the endpapers of the hardback are the two-page map of the street. I always really wanted to do something like that: graphically, I love stuff like that. It’s got this weird, nostalgic feel, even though it’s nostalgic for the ‘30s and the ‘40s. But that was where it started—the idea of doing a book that was really a bunch of different overlapping stories that all took place in the same place.

  And the inspirations for it were more literary. There are a lot of comics that have done stuff like that before; short stories that Chris Ware and Dan Clowes have done, stuff like that. But I was really coming off of reading a bunch of Tom Perrotta, and watching a bunch of old movies from the ‘90s. And it was a very indie film kind of thing to do, to have like a bunch of different stories that were overlapping.

  io9: I think it was Robert Altman who really made that a ‘90s movie thing.

  Brubaker: Yeah, totally. When I was explaining to my wife what the book was going to be, she said, “Oh, that sounds like Short Cuts, which is funny because in my mind, I was thinking, “It’ll be kind of like all these different people who lived on this street during this one summer.” And when I first started thinking of it, I thought, “Well, what if someone’s interviewing all of them?” Then I just decided to get rid of the interviewer and have them talking directly to us, and I thought to myself, “Oh, that’s a thing I can do because it’s comics.” And break the fourth wall, and jump around in time, and watch them get older—just really use the language of comics.

  io9: Those interviews are something that I wanted to mention to you, because there’s this paradoxical way that it actually seems more personal because you have multiple voices speaking directly to the reader. I’m not sure if you got that same sense.

  Brubaker: Definitely. I mean, every character in any book by any author is some part of the author, or the author taking some part of themselves and blending it with something they’re making up, or something that happened to a friend. Subconsciously, you’re always writing about yourself, I think. So, yeah, this is an incredibly personal work. And there were parts of it that were hard to write because they just almost felt too much like—Larry Charles gave an interview recently about how he had a falling-out with Larry David at some point. And he said something along the lines of, “Loss is a thing that you learn to deal with in life if you’re lucky enough to.” One of the things I really wanted to do with this story is have people at different ages: the little girl is 12 years old, and Tommy and Karina are 18 or 17 years old. Palmer’s in his early 30s. Everybody’s slightly at a different place in their life. I wanted to show that, to try and go through the full spectrum of the world through these small characters in this little nowhere town, this nowhere street.

  io9: Did you feel like it was constricting to be working within this limited setting? Were you trying to raise the net a little bit higher for yourself to see if you could work within that challenge?

  Brubaker: It was definitely a challenge, but it was more fun than anything else to me. The biggest stumbling block was that I filled up a whole notebook in two days with all the stories of the different characters. Then it was really about how to weave their stories around each other and in what sequence. In my mind, when I was first jotting everything down, I thought the dead body would appear sometime during the first third of the book, but it turned up in the last third [instead]. Stuff shifts. It was a joy to write it.

  I’d actually want to do another really contained thing like that at some point. I would love to do something that all took place in a motel in the middle of nowhere. It felt almost freeing to be able to jump around from character to character.

  io9: I guess that’s also the appeal of the country house mystery, or the cozy mystery genres, because it focuses on the characters, in some ways, by necessity.

  Brubaker: I can’t remember which one it’s called. I think it’s Appointment with Death. It’s the Poirot movie Peter Ustinov did after Death on the Nile. And his recounting of where everybody was during the crime is something that is burned into my brain from childhood. I love stuff like that. I think that’s why the book is a crime story. Everybody in the book is either a criminal or a child superhero. So I feel like it is still a crime book, but really, it’s more influenced by experimental fiction, trying to do something where the story felt bigger than what you were actually seeing.

  io9: It certainly has the feel of something that’s autobiographical to some extent. I’m not sure how true that is.

  Brubaker: Some bits of it are close to things that really happened. The Tommy and Karina characters are loosely based on me as a youth, and an old girlfriend of mine.

  io9: There are some echoes of the stuff you did in Lowlife [an early Brubaker series based on his own youth] back in the day.

  Brubaker: Yeah. There’s no exact dialogue or anything like that. The conversation about The Twilight Zone that’s such a pivotal thing in the book was really a conversation that I had with some total stranger in a parking lot while we were waiting for drugs once, and never saw that person ever again. You take bits and pieces of things that are happening in your life. It definitely was a little bit of a callback to my early days, like the Lowlife years when I first started publishing back in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s.

  And that’s part of what the book is about, I think. How as you get older, you end up feeling more nostalgic about your past and looking back at it, and how you can eventually get to a place where you can let go of that a little bit. That’s part of Tommy’s journey, to learn to live in his present and appreciate it instead of always looking back.

  io9: And it’s also about the question of whether you can understand anything that happened in your past, right?

  Brubaker: Yeah. It’s that famous John Lennon quote about “life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.” The older you get, the more true that feels. It’s like, “ How do you make God laugh? Make a plan?” The nature of life. Palmer is trying to control his life. So he doesn’t end up getting very much of one.

  io9: Because you do a lot of crime stories with Sean, so much of what both of you do is focused on one particular character through their specific narrative viewpoint over the course of a whole graphic novel. Was it strange for either of you to be working with so many different viewpoints and so many different visual styles for characters?

  Brubaker: No, I don’t think so, because I gave Sean the list of characters and all their descriptions. And then my wife made a rough sketch of the neighborhood so Sean could design the neighborhood and make a digital map of it. He hired somebody to help him make a 3D digital map of the whole neighborhood because he wanted to make sure all the houses were in the right place in the backgrounds. When people were walking on the sidewalk, you knew exactly where they were.

  It was funny: I sent Sean the map and he was starting to design it, and then he found somebody—an architect or somebody—to help him do the whole thing. He would just move the map around in the backgrounds: whenever I got the pages, I could see exactly where all the houses were. He had to do a lot of the inks and stuff, a lot of detail work, and adding all the trees and everything. But in general, the layout of the street was right there. I think it was a lot of fun for both of us to do.

  We’ve done a few things here and there where we’ll jump around between different characters. Each book is a different character, really. But each arc tends to focus on one central character that we’re sticking with for some extended period of time. We’ve done The Fade Out where every chapter focused on a different character, but there was a smaller cast to revolve between. And in “Cruel Summer”, every chapter was a different character, but the story kept moving forward. So it really jumped between character and character.

  But those were still plot-driven, like a murder mystery or crime thriller. You can sense the moving plot through each chapter. Whereas some chapters in [Where the Body Was] are just somebody standing there talking to you about a guy. It felt a lot more experimental on that storytelling level. I don’t know if we’ve ever done a thing before where somebody stood there and broke the fourth wall and talked directly to the camera. When I first started doing comics, it was something that I did very commonly, because as far back as the old comic strips around the turn of the 20th century, they’ve had characters just walking and talking. Like, half of Peanuts is just different characters walking and talking out loud to the reader. So it felt like a real comic book kind of thing to do. And I felt, partly because we’re having such a run of success with our career right now, as far as our transition from single issues into only doing graphic novels—it felt like, let’s take advantage of our position to try to do something risky and a little bit weird and a little bit hard to describe.

  I’ve said, “It’s kind of like reading a podcast.” It’s like, imagine your favorite true crime podcast, but it’s a graphic novel and it’s really just about love, actually. And I love the technique of having the characters talk directly to the reader and break the fourth wall, in particular. It punctures what we don’t even think about as a ridiculous convention of fictional narrative in the first place: why is this person talking to you? We never question it. But once we actually recognize that they are talking to us, we see that’s always just been a convention. It’s really weird. In the early days of fiction, for hundreds of years, a lot of writers had trouble wrapping their head around the fact that you can just write a story. That’s why there are all these epistolary novels.

  io9: Yeah, Daniel Defoe would do stuff like, “I found this journal that had been lost for 50 years, and here’s the story the person told.”

  Brubaker: I still do it. I do it with the Reckless books. I did the exact same thing, but now it’s literary tradition. It was only in the 19th and 20th centuries that people just started writing without worrying about who’s telling this story and questioning, “when is he writing this down?” And the answer can be, “Well, he didn’t.” It’s a major shift in literature. You’re hearing his story. He may be dead by the end of it. Now we’re okay with finding out at the end of a story that the main character was dead the whole time, because of Sunset Boulevard. Until then, people would have rioted in the streets. Nobody reads Dracula, really, because we’ve seen all the movies and we know the story. Dracula is a bunch of diary entries and letters and shit. It’s super boring.

  io9: Well, I don’t see how a novel with a cowboy vampire hunter can be totally boring.

  Brubaker: It’s not boring, but the structure of it is part of epistolary novels that just used to be a thing. Even with Dumas and others, there was always this sense that someone was actually telling you the story. We lost that in the 20th century at some point. We stopped worrying about that so much.

  io9: With that in mind, process-wise, did you build this story from the characters and the voices outward, or did you have in mind where it was going to go in terms of the mystery about the death?

  Brubaker: Oh, yeah. I had everything mapped out. I wrote down everybody’s stories. Figuring out how some of the stories overlapped was something that I figured out as I was working on it a little bit. I pretty much knew who all the main characters were: there were a couple of characters I had jotted down in my notebook but didn’t end up using or having room for. The main thrust of the book—the Palmer story and his affair with his neighbor—started out as a thing I was working on a long time ago that just didn’t feel like enough of a story. It was loosely based on a thing back in the late ‘80s, I think, or early ‘90s: my stepdad, who’s long passed away now, was a therapist, and one of the partners in his practice got arrested for trying to trick one of his patients into murdering [the therapist’s] wife during a divorce proceeding. And he was going to frame the patient and say that he was obsessed with them or something, and that he’d murdered his wife. That was like a story I’d always been sitting on as, “someday I’m going to use that in something.”

  It’s just so weird when you have an actual two degrees of separation from a murder plot; when you realize people in real life do occasionally think, “It’d be cheaper to just have this person killed.” You’re like, “Holy shit.” The idea of it being somebody who’s a therapist, who’s listening to other people’s stuff and thinking about the mind all the time: that’s interesting, because putting yourself beyond morality is something that you can see a therapist doing. Like Leopold and Loeb, “Oh, I can do this thing and let myself not feel guilt. “It seems like the kind of thought experiment a shrink might have.

  io9: Is that one of the appeals of a crime story to you, that sense what can put somebody beyond a normal sense of morality?

  Brubaker: I guess. I don’t know. I think it’s probably because when I was a teenager, I was a drug addict and a criminal, and I came out of that to become a big noir and comics nerd. I mean, I was already a comics nerd, but when I started writing crime fiction, it helped me find a link between something that felt more personal and self-expressive, and something that also had an exciting story to tell. I love being able to blend things that really matter to me into a genre story that is compelling. I think genre can talk about our world in a more effective and subtle way sometimes than straight fiction can.

  io9: Why do you think that is?

  Brubaker: Everything’s a little bit more interesting when there’s a murder mystery going on.

  Look at the book Pulp that Sean and I did three or four years ago. It’s about two old cowboys fighting Nazis in 1939 New York City: an ex-Pinkerton and an ex-outlaw who are still alive as old men taking on the Nazi Bund. You could do a story just about that night at the Garden, and the Nazi Bund in New York in the ‘30s. You could get that same stuff into just a really straight story about what was really happening back then. Or you could do a story where some cowboys rob some Nazis and get in a big shootout. It still has all the same context. And if you didn’t know about the Nazi Bund and what they were doing in 1939 New York, you could still read Pulp and walk out of it feeling like you learned something, but you also got a rollicking good time, too.

  It heightens the drama and the emotion—there’s literally a gun to your head.

  It’s something I noticed when I first started reading mysteries. When I was working on Castro Street at this little used bookstore, reading old mysteries and stuff, an author came in—this Latino gay mystery writer who was also a lawyer. He wrote a series of books about a gay lawyer in San Francisco who was also Latino. It said a lot about the Mexican community in San Francisco and the gay community in San Francisco. It highlighted something I hadn’t seen anybody have the guts to write about, but something that I’d seen firsthand in the neighborhood, having lived and worked in that area for years: there was a split amongst the community—this is in the ‘90s. It was a really weird political divide that you couldn’t totally explain to an outsider: a lot of people would feel very uncomfortable trying to write about it.

  But here in his crime novel, this guy wrote about the split in the gay activist community between AIDS activists who didn’t have HIV, and AIDS activists who did.

  There was a different mystery novel that I was reading that pointed out how minority communities are much more forgiving of their politicians because they want representation so badly. They’ll reelect Marion Barry even after he’s been sent to prison because he is a voice for them. It’s things like that, which I think you can write about in genre and seem less didactic. It’s just part of the world of the story that you’re telling. It goes back as far as [Dashiell] Hammett. Hammett was hugely influential on Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who didn’t write crime fiction. And I think Hammett’s work is, in a lot of ways, more fun to read than Hemingway’s work.

  That’s always my thing; I want to entertain people, but it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing thing. The sheep’s clothing is the crime story, I guess. And the wolf is the real meaning of the story, which I often don’t even know when I’m writing it. Until I got to the end of Where the Body Was, I didn’t realize how much of it was about loss and aging. Those are things that are on my mind a lot more these days.

  io9: Was it a story you think you could have done when you were younger, or is this the kind of thing where you have to be at this point in your career?

  Brubaker: It had to be at this point in my career, and this point in my life, and at this point in the world, I guess. We’re always writing something reacting to our lives and our world. This is definitely not a book I could have written at 25 or 30.

  io9: You and Sean have had quite a number of years of collaboration And I’m wondering what your process together looks like at this point.

  Brubaker: We work exactly the same as we have for 20 years. It’s a very steady collaboration. I don’t know if there’s anybody else in comics who’s ever really done what we do for this long.

  io9: I was thinking about that. Whether I could even picture any other writer or artist collaborations of this length.

  Brubaker: I think Stan [Lee] and Jack [Kirby] did more comics than us, but they did it over a shorter period of time; they only worked together for about 10 years. We’re 20 years into it, and we’ve got something like 40 books in print. We’re working on the Criminal TV show now. And at the point that the show comes out, we’ll have 11 Criminal graphic novels in print, not including the deluxe hardbacks. So yeah, we’re an incredibly prolific team. And I think part of it is that we trust each other. If I send Sean six or eight pages of a chapter, he’ll just keep working forward, knowing that I’m going to be there with the next chapter before he’s done. And we have such a steady track record of producing books that I think both of us just really trust each other at this point.

  io9: I take it there’s no temptation that’s developed at this point to explore other partners.

  Brubaker: Why? Who’s better than Sean? I email with Sean every day, and I get pages from him almost every day. It’s just a great working relationship. It’s like a director and a DP, or a director and an actor, or a writer and a director. You’ve got a good thing going.

  But the real barometer of success for me underneath all of it has been, do I get to keep doing this? When we first started out doing Criminal, it was self-financed by me from my royalties for killing Captain America. I was paying Sean and our colorist to do the book, because at that point, there was no market for what we wanted to do in comics. Now, 20 years in, I look at it and think, “Wow, how lucky that I’ve been able to spend most of my career doing what I wanted to do.”

  io9: You’ve certainly established a brand together, which can’t have been easy.

  Brubaker: It’s funny, because our publisher tells us that a lot of the younger people coming up to him are just starting to publish, and say that Sean and I are doing what they want to do. We’re like the goalpost now. It’s really flattering, obviously; it’s an indication that a lot of those people are reading our books, but what we do is just put our heads down and keep producing material. Neither of us really waste a lot of time on social media or the Internet; we pretty much just do our books and we work steadily.

  The first few years of Criminal were not a successful thing. We had to really fight to get that book known and to build a market for it. We just kept producing the material in the face of apathy or adversity, sometimes in a market that really didn’t want crime comics at all.

  io9: So where do you go next?

  Brubaker: I never want to try and do something that feels exactly like whatever we did before. Even the Reckless books feel slightly different from each other because their plots are different and they take place in different years. The next thing is really it’s hard to describe. It’s kind of like a Satanic Panic neo-noir. It takes place in modern times.

  io9: Right, because Satanic Panic can mean any time in 20-year cycles, so take your pick.

  Brubaker: It’s about a woman who was part of the Satanic Panic of the ‘80s as a child who is grown up now in our modern world. It’s kind of a weird horror-thriller noir story about the Satanic Panic. It’s called Houses of the Unholy. Sean said it’s the weirdest thing we’ve ever done. So take that for what you will.

  I know what the next book we’re going to do after that one is because I’m a few days away from finishing the last pages of that one. After that, we’ll probably do some more Criminal stuff, because I’ve got two or three ideas for different Criminal books that I’ve been wanting to do. We’ll keep trying to keep ourselves entertained, and hopefully entertain our readership, too.

• CrimeReads - https://crimereads.com/exploring-a-reckless-vision-of-los-angeles-with-ed-brubaker/

  Exploring a Reckless Vision of Los Angeles, with Ed Brubaker
  Alex Segura in conversation with Ed Brubaker about his graphic crime novel series
  August 3, 2022 By Alex Segura
  GRAPHIC CONTENT

  Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are no strangers to comics and noir, blending both primal elements of story into everything they do—whether it’s mainstream superhero work or their more recent, and more personal, forays into creator-owned, character-driven crime comics. Brubaker and Phillips have worked together so long they’ve become synonymous, a pair of names that complete each other, building a legendary reputation with series like Criminal, Fatale, Kill or be Killed, Incognito, Bad Weekend, and more.

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  Their latest collaboration, while still firmly entrenched in the dark corners of graphic novel crime, marks a departure of sorts. Instead of releasing their stories via monthly, comic shop-focused “floppy” comic book installments that would later be bound and collected as trade paperbacks for the book trade, the creators have pivoted to doing a series of original graphic novels. Complete, done-in-one stories that present a complete adventure, but also serve as part of a bigger, ongoing series. It’s a love letter to classic private eye fiction, steeped in Brubaker’s vision of a Los Angeles that no longer exists, with a flawed and complex protagonist, all masterfully illustrated by Phillips, with colors by his son, Jacob Phillips. The end result, Reckless, has proven to be a smashing success for the creators and its publisher, indie comics company, Image Comics—in terms of sales, acclaim, and general buzz. The series follows sort-of private eye Ethan Reckless, a modern synthesis of classic pulp detectives like Philip Marlowe, Easy Rawlins, and Matthew Scudder with a wholly modern and knowing twist.

  The fourth installment in the series, The Ghost in You, hit recently from Image, building on narratives and concepts established earlier in the series, but also presenting the kind of story new fans can digest on their own—not an easy feat, and one that only the best serialized crime stories can pull off. I sat down with Brubaker to talk about the origins of the series, what he and Phillips hope to accomplish, and why readers should check out The Ghost in You.

  The idea to create the Reckless saga as a series of original graphic novels—book-bound comics that are longer and usually in hardback—as opposed to the duo’s tried and true monthly comics output was one that came to Brubaker as the world shuddered during the early days of the pandemic.

  “During those first weeks of lockdown, the entire comics industry shut down. We had been about to launch a new monthly comic, and suddenly those didn’t exist anymore,” Brubaker said. “So I scrambled to think of something Sean and I could work on, anyway. I didn’t want to just sit around and see what the future would bring us. But at that point it really did seem possible that the comics market would go away, so we decided to start working on a graphic novel, figuring if the worst came, we could sell it on Kickstarter or something. And it gave us a way to escape the pandemic doom at the same time.”

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  As he pondered what to do next, Brubaker found himself finding comfort in classic P.I. fiction, including the work of Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, and more. That, in turn, nudged him in the creative direction he’d been looking for.

  “I’d been going back to some old favorites in those early weeks of the lockdown—Lew Archer, Parker, Travis McGee—and I thought it might be fun to see what our version of an old time paperback pulp hero would be,” Brubaker said “So I started jotting down ideas, and it was like I’d been secretly planning to write these books for a long time and didn’t realize it.”

  Like the best P.I. fiction, the Reckless books present a story only Brubaker could tell, in terms of setting and time.

  “I loved going back to that era—the 60s thru the gritty 80s—so that Ethan Reckless feels—and the books look—like he’s a forgotten remnant of that period of pulp fiction, but since it’s written from a modern perspective, that, I think, brings something else to it,” Brubaker said. “A kind of weight of the future looking back.”

  Reckless himself is the protagonist, but the series’ setting of Los Angeles ranks a close second in terms of importance. The idea of doing a series of graphic novels set in different times in Brubaker’s adopted hometown of L.A. was too tempting to ignore, the writer notes.

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  “One of my favorite things about comics, graphic novels, whatever you want to call them, is that it costs the same to do a period piece (or a sci-fi) as it does to do something that takes place in modern times. It’s just about research and trying to get it right. For the Reckless books, I’ve been trying to recreate my kind of ‘dream LA’ from my childhood,” Brubaker said. “I didn’t grow up in Los Angeles, but we visited it a lot in the 70s and 80s, and I was always Hollywood obsessed, because my uncle was a once-famous screenwriter—he wrote Crossfire, On the Beach, and The Wild One, among many others. So in making these books, I’m also trying to showcase forgotten or lost places in LA that meant something to me growing up. Like pieces of the LA punk scene, or cool old restaurants, or the way Venice used to feel—cheaper and more dangerous, but with lots more roller skaters.”

  Brubaker had a clear vision of how he wanted these iterations of Los Angeles to look, and that involved some brainstorming with the books’ artistic team of Sean and Jacob Phillips.

  “At first I had to explain to Sean and Jake that California wasn’t always as dried out as it is now. I wanted this LA to have the dreamy qualities of something like a Malick film, with rich colors and deep blue skies,” Brubaker said. “I want it to feel like a distant memory from our youth, the way we picture it in our minds.”

  The series, from a story perspective, doesn’t shy away from shedding a light on the city’s darker, deadlier corners, spending time on parts of its history that many would prefer to see swept under the rug.

  “I try to touch on some of the darker parts of LA history in each of the books, too. Things like CIA drug-running, and killer cults of the 70s, skinheads, police gangs, the urban land battles that helped make South LA what it came to be in the 80s,” Brubaker said. “And in the new book in the series, I got to use bits and pieces of famous LA murder houses and urban legends, and blend them into our own twisted version.”

  The Ghost in You, the latest installment in the Reckless series, shifts focus slightly—from Ethan to his plucky assistant.

  “This is the fourth book we’ve put out in this series—each book tells its own complete story—and one of the things I love so much about detective series is the side characters—the partners and assistants, the irregulars,” Brubaker said. “And with each book in the Reckless series, we’ve learned more and more about Anna, Ethan’s assistant—and projectionist at the movie theater they work out of. After so much of the third book was about their long and strange friendship, it felt like the best next move was to let Anna tackle a case all on her own, so we could spend a lot more time with her, and learn more of her history and what drives her.

  So this time Ethan is out of town on a case up in post-’89 earthquake San Francisco, and while he’s gone Anna meets one of her childhood heroes, ex-horror host Evilina, who has a problem with the Hollywood Hills mansion she just inherited. Which is a famous LA murder house. It was really great to devote a whole book to Anna, and see her smarts and struggles as she worked the case, and how the case brings her wandering mother back into her life.”

  Like most great stories, the characters within the Reckless series have started moving and breathing on their own, making Brubaker and Phillips chroniclers of three-dimensional people that are as close to real as fictional characters can be.

  “I have to say, as a writer I’m finding great joy in just watching Ethan and Anna move through their lives in this past version of LA. They feel like as real to me as my actual old friends, in some ways,” Brubaker said. “I guess they’re emotionally real, since they represent that feeling—the way time is fleeting and your life is made up of little moments with good friends when you look back at it. I find a certain comfort and warmth in writing about them, seeing them grow over those course of these books.

  I think the last chapter of GHOST IN YOU is maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever written, and it’s so small and human, but also not small at all.”

  ***

  Reckless: A Ghost in You is out now from Image Comics.

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Image, $24.99 (144p) ISBN 978-1-5343-1924-0

Still up for a fight, Brubaker and Phillips's Ethan Reckless is feeling his age in the slow-burning third entry of their Los Angeles noir series. It's 1988, three years following Friend of the Devil, and Ethan is barely pretending to be a private investigator. But he does pick up a case, and it's a doozie. Hired by a Black city councilmember to look into a scuzzy and rich white developer, Ethan is pleased to be sticking it to the Man. But the mystery plot ends up feeling like background as Ethan traps himself in pained nostalgia. Worried he is losing Anna--his trusty punk assistant and only friend, finally given her due in a touching origin story-Ethan loses himself in weed, old movies, and memories: "after a while, even remembering seemed pointless." Moody washedout art recalls the cinematic oddities that Ethan and Anna watch in their old movie house headquarters. Private-eye tropes like decadent upper-crust parties and corrupt cops abound, while sudden action scenes cut through Ethan's hazy, guilt-ridden flashback narration, such as when he smashed a drug pusher's face with a skateboard. It all feels less like a self-contained story than a prelude for a dark implosion heading Ethan's way. Series fans will ride along in anticipation. (Oct.)

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"Destroy All Monsters: A Reckless Book." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 39, 27 Sept. 2021, p. 59. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A677981459/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4be88dd9. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Brubaker, Ed (text) & Sean Phillips (illus.). Destroy All Monsters. Image Comics. (Reckless, Bk. 3). Oct. 2021.144p. ISBN 9781534319240. $24.99. GRAPHIC NOVELS

The third installment in Brubaker's Southern California--set noir series (following Friend of the Devil) opens in 1988. Unlicensed investigator/troublemaker Ethan Reckless is estranged from his assistant Anna (both are white) because of his vocal disapproval of Anna's latest boyfriend. When a local white politician approaches Ethan for help taking down a business tycoon who habitually preys upon Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs, Ethan accepts the job, in the hope that ruining such a vile figure will bring him and punky, idealistic Anna together again. Ethan and Anna soon uncover a web of corruption involving blackmail, bribery, and an underground brothel. Ethan advises his client to notify the FBI; when the politician instead takes drastic action, Ethan and Anna find themselves targeted by vicious enemies. VERDICT Phillips imbues the sundrenched splendor of Southern California with a nostalgic mournfulness perfectly keyed to Brubaker's script. Focusing on the fragile bond between Ethan and Anna Tom Batten is a writer and teacher whose work has appeared in the Guardian and the New Yorker. He lives in Virginia exposes new depths in both of the characters, while building to a wrenchingly emotional climax.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Batten, Tom. "Destroy All Monsters." Library Journal, vol. 146, no. 10, Oct. 2021, p. 68. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A678264968/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=98610abe. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

The Ghost in You: A Reckless Book

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Image, $24.99 (144p) ISBN 978-1-5343-2208-0

Brubaker and Phillips's Reckless series takes a detour in this spookier and less violent but still exciting L.A. noir. It's 1989, and gloomy gumshoe Ethan is away on a job in San Francisco, having left purplehaired punk assistant Anna running the El Ricardo--part shabby-cool movie house (showing Kurosawa, Lynch, and spaghetti westerns), part headquarters for their offthe-books detective business. Anna takes the job when an aging fatale walks in: Lorna Valentine, once the B-movie scream queen "Evilina," who believes the Hollywood Hills mansion she inherited from a stalker superfan is haunted. Just after Anna starts investigating the dark resume of this "murder house," she is knocked off course (just as Ethan typically is), this time by a suspicious cop and her flighty mother, a recovering alcoholic. Following form for the genre (some chapters are named after classic mystery films), the story starts in darkness and danger (Anna stabbed and bleeding out in the mansion) before dredging up dirty secrets that illuminate the city's history. Though this arc doesn't quite evoke the shadow of rugged doom cast in Ethan's stories, Anna's tough but idealistic cynicism brings a sharper energy to this superb series. (Apr.)

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"The Ghost in You: A Reckless Book." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 15, 11 Apr. 2022, p. 58. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A700925574/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c464dedc. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Torn Batten is a writer and teacher whose work has appeared in the Guardian and The New Yorker. He lives in Virginia

* Brubaker, Ed (text) & Sean Phillips (illus.). Night Fever. Image Comics. Jun. 2023.120p. ISBN 9781534326095. $24.99. M

Stricken by insomnia while on a business trip to an unnamed European city, U.S. publishing executive Jonathan Webb walks through the night, contemplating his general dissatisfaction with life. He wanders into a party in an underground nightclub, where he befriends Rainer, a mysterious, charismatic raconteur who becomes his guide through a lawless, nocturnal world of lavish soirees, mind-altering drugs, and wanton violence. It's all thrilling until Reiner's influence leads Webb to commit an act of violence that threatens his professional standing and, more importantly, the safety of his wife and children. After five entries in two years of their bestselling series Reckless, Brubaker and Phillips present a stand-alone noir thriller about a man forced to reckon with the consequences of indulging the primal impulses lurking within the darkest corners of his soul. Brubaker's masterfully hardboiled scripting is both unnervingly nihilistic and propulsively thrilling, and Phillips's illustration has rarely evoked such nuances of character or absolute menace. VERDICT Another masterwork from a collaborative team that seems increasingly incapable ot producing anything less.

By Tom Batten

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Batten, Tom. "Night Fever." Library Journal, vol. 148, no. 4, Apr. 2023, p. 102. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A744137493/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=42965a66. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Night Fever

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Image, $24.99 (128p) ISBN 978-1-5343-2609-5

A man on a tedious business trip discovers his dark side in this taut thriller from reliably top-notch noir duo Brubaker and Phillips (the Reckless series). Jonathan Webb is a foreign rights rep attending a book show in Paris who spends sleepless nights contemplating his outwardly successful but inwardly staid home life. On one of his nocturnal wanders, he comes across a masked gathering ("sex and drugs... violence... but with a veneer of class") reminiscent of Eyes Wide Shut. Webb slips in using a fake persona and meets Rainer, a European man of mystery who seemingly lives the exciting life that Webb is only pretending to inhabit. Losing his grip on reality, Webb falls deeper and deeper into Rainer's chaotic lifestyle (more steamy soirees alternate with getting punched up in alleys by toughs)--but when one of his own authors get involved, Webb realizes he's let the fantasy go too far. Brubaker's sharp dialogue ("I thought the night had peaked when I blew up a cop car, but maybe it was just beginning") pairs perfectly with Phillips's atmospheric rendering of the moody Parisian milieu. Details are choice, from industry gossip between patrons milling around at a banal hotel bar to a trippy psychedelic epiphany, with coloring done by the artist's son. It's not the most original tale ever told, but Brubaker and Phillips tell it in crackling, effortless style. (June)

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"Night Fever." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 23, 5 June 2023, p. 66. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A753089055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eb65a89d. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Brubaker, Ed (text) & Sean Phillips (illus.). Where the Body Was. Image Comics. Jan. 2024.144p. ISBN 9781534398269. $24.99.

M

Prolific collaborators Brubaker and Phillips follow their surrealistic thriller Night Fever with this playfully experimental, though no less grittily gripping, standalone whodunit-style murder mystery set in a suburban neighborhood over the summer of 1984. Tommy is infatuated with Karina, a runaway with a habit of stealing cash and jewelry from the homes surrounding the boarding house where they live. They're both wary of running afoul of Palmer, a bullying police detective enjoying a passionate affair with Toni, the dissatisfied wife of a prominent psychiatrist who seems to be engaged in some sort of secret conspiracy with a Vietnam War veteran living in the woods near their home. They all live under the watchful eye of a lonely preadolescent girl named Lila, who, disguised as the masked hero Roller Derby Girl, regularly patrols the neighborhood in search of any evil forces in need of vanquishing. One afternoon she finds a dead body instead, setting in motion a chain of events that will change the lives of all involved forever. VERDICT A fast-paced mystery, propelled by a fascinating cast of characters, that builds to a profoundly moving and deeply romantic climax. Absolutely not to be missed.

By Tom Batten

Tom Batten is a writer and teacher whose work has appeared in the Guardian and The New Yorker. He lives in Virginia

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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Batten, Tom. "Where the Body Was." Library Journal, vol. 148, no. 10, Oct. 2023, p. 122. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767645010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f5d2db8. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Where the Body Was

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Image, $24.99 (144p) ISBN 978-1-5343-9826-9

A quiet suburban block heats up with drugs, suspicion, and murder over the summer of 1984 in this accomplished if abbreviated outing from Brubaker and Phillips (the Reckless series). The duo bring their trademark wry and world-weary tone to a tangle of badly kept secrets and neatly packaged twists. A nosy neighbor, one of many narrators in a crowded ensemble, describes how a fight at a run-down boarding house on the block kicked off assorted mayhem: "the breakins... the murder... heartbreak." Other characters include a bored wife engaged in an affair with her police detective neighbor, drugged-up teens on a burglary spree, a private investigator looking for a lost girl, and a roller-skating 11 -year-old self-appointed neighborhood guardian whose cape and mask style her like a G-rated Hit-Girl. Brubaker barely sets up his story elements, which Phillips depicts in his usual pulpy realism, before cuing the chain reaction that leads to the tidily constructed climax--unsatisfying dramatically but greatly improved by a moodily romantic coda. The throwback setting is evocative even if it seems designed only to allow the proceedings to carry on without the glare of social media (and for Brubaker to drop in tips of the hat to classic punk bands like the Descendants). Though not quite up to the duo's usual panache, this is still savvy enough to be a sure thing for fans of suburban neo-noir. (Jan.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Where the Body Was." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 2, 15 Jan. 2024, p. 59. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A781251425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=75f56005. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Houses of the Unholy

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Image, $24.99 (144p) ISBN 978-1-53432-742-9

A teen held hostage in the trunk of a pot-smoking investigator's car kicks off the latest haunting noir from Brubaker and Phillips (the Reckless series). Natalie Burns's job entails removing indoctrinated kids from cults and returning them to their parents. She knows all too well how easy it is to believe lies--when she was a kid in the 1980s, she got caught up in the satanic panic and testified against her summer camp counselors. Having spent her life wrestling with vague memories of a predatory cult that she now believes to be false, Natalie is approached by a rogue FBI agent, who offers to get the criminal charges against her droppped (she kidnapped that last teen while using a fake ID) if she helps him dig into a series of murders involving her fellow accusers, known as the "Satanic Six." But when trauma rears its ugly head and an old friend turns up dead, even the people closest to Natalie may prove to be devils in disguise. Speckled with vibrant color, bold sequencing, and carefully crafted splash pages, this dive into the underbelly of the satanic panic moves at a rapid-fire pace while sticking to the atmospheric formula Brubaker and Phillips are known for. It's a spine-tingling addition to their oeuvre. (Aug.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 PWxyz, LLC
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"Houses of the Unholy." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 30, 5 Aug. 2024, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804959367/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=62753851. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

"Destroy All Monsters: A Reckless Book." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 39, 27 Sept. 2021, p. 59. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A677981459/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4be88dd9. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024. Batten, Tom. "Destroy All Monsters." Library Journal, vol. 146, no. 10, Oct. 2021, p. 68. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A678264968/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=98610abe. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024. "The Ghost in You: A Reckless Book." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 15, 11 Apr. 2022, p. 58. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A700925574/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c464dedc. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024. Batten, Tom. "Night Fever." Library Journal, vol. 148, no. 4, Apr. 2023, p. 102. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A744137493/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=42965a66. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024. "Night Fever." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 23, 5 June 2023, p. 66. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A753089055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=eb65a89d. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024. Batten, Tom. "Where the Body Was." Library Journal, vol. 148, no. 10, Oct. 2023, p. 122. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A767645010/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f5d2db8. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024. "Where the Body Was." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 2, 15 Jan. 2024, p. 59. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A781251425/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=75f56005. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024. "Houses of the Unholy." Publishers Weekly, vol. 271, no. 30, 5 Aug. 2024, p. 47. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A804959367/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=62753851. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

• Comics Beat
  https://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-novel-review-brubaker-and-phillips-enter-houses-of-the-unholy/
  Word count: 1159

  Graphic Novel Review: Brubaker and Phillips enter HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY
  Another shot at experimentation from the veteran collaborators.

  By Steve Baxi -08/15/2024 11:00 am0
  Houses of the Unholy
  Writer: Ed Brubaker
  Artist: Sean Phillips
  Colorist: Jacob Phillips
  Publisher: Image Comics
  Publication Date: August 2024

  This has been a big year for Satanic Panic in media. In film, we’ve had Longlegs, Late Night with the Devil, Immaculate, The First Omen and Maxxxine just to name a few. Perhaps the slow decline in a shared, stable reality has forced us to focus on isolated narratives that give rhyme or reason to unspeakable suffering and trauma. Maybe a collective appreciation of Satanic influence is a benchmark for just how close to the end we all feel. Or, on the other hand, it could just be that the imagery and scares make for a fun ride.

  All-Star Comic duo Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, along with colorish Jacob Phillips, are back this year with another original graphic novel, Houses of the Unholy. The book follows the investigation of FBI Agent West and a woman named Natalie Burns as they track down a group of people who were used in childhood to advance conspiracy theories about devil worship and Satanism. The book alternates between the present day investigation and flashbacks to Natalie’s childhood that helps establish the mystery and demonic activity in question.

  The book sets the tone well before the story starts. As soon as you’re past the cover, the interior of the book starts with a very 80s wallpaper pattern. The floral arrangements and garish shade of yellow then move into “HOUSES OF THE UNHOLY” written in a font that resembles blood on the walls, with little splashes of red near the bottom of the page. It’s a promising start that’s consistent with the tone of the rest of the story. As you move between chapters, a pentagram slowly drips blood, moving towards the bottom of the page, as well. The whole presentation sells the slow decline into horror.

  These stylistic choices aid the book immensely, and Jacob Phillips takes full advantage of the excessive blood and 80s aesthetics with his color choice. The alternating flashback chapters are all washed in red, giving the scenes a sense of foreboding. When you’re looking at little kids talking about being led down dark halls and touched by demons, you’re already on edge. But when the whole world is shades of red, there’s a nice extra push towards the evil lurking at the heart of the story.

  But then the book drops the ball for me.

  Ever since Pulp, Brubaker and Phillips have shifted towards an original graphic novel format. For books like Reckless, this really worked, replacing the monthly floppies with much nicer looking hardcovers and complete stories available upon release. But a lifetime of monthly comics writing is not a habit anyone can easily break, and Brubaker’s script here feels like it was designed with the intention of being in a regular comic book issue format. The opening of the book where we meet Natailie has two major beats: her having a kid in her trunk, and her being arrested and meeting Agent West. The fact that she’s a PI and that she’s looking for a missing kid are all essentially red herrings, familiar trappings of a Brubaker script to be subverted later when the nature of the real mystery takes shape. Except that the events are so truncated that these moments don’t have the proper impact. It felt to me like this was supposed to be set up with a full 22 page issue. The structure of the book also supports this, as each present day scene and its corresponding flashback form natural issues, or chapter breaks.

  As I was reading, I started considering all the elements I imagined Brubaker would somehow wrap up by the end, but much of the book feels like it’s rushing to the ending and not giving you proper time to understand every section for what it truly is. Nataile’s brother, for example, just feels thrown into the story at a random point and his presence doesn’t improve much from there. Twists and turns are compounded after the halfway mark but we never live in the emotions of the scene.

  At the core, this is a story about Satanism as a cultural byproduct of political unrest and evolving technology. The internet abyss of conspiracy theories, as well as the religious narratives that bind communities, all contribute to a desire to believe in something monstrous, or the embodiment of evil. A lot of these ideas represent interesting subversions of satanic fiction. It’s not so much that we take the devil as a given, as a monkey’s paw style supernatural karma for our evil desires. But rather, how our response to an unjust world animates a desire for this sort of belief in the first place. Houses of the Unholy is unique in that it takes the historical connection between late 80s interest in Satanism and the birth of the internet as co-constitutive forces. One drive enables the other in a vicious cycle that’s more sad than evil. I wish the book had the proper space to explore that idea, but instead it feels undercooked.

  Houses of the Unholy

  Sean Phillips, while being practiced in occult style art and horror, also feels ill suited to the material. The book is never particularly scary, nor does it use its artistic real estate to build any sense of dread. Much like Where the Body Was, this is a story that is explicitly going for a certain genre and tone outside of what we normally see from the paid, but the artistic choices, the paneling and the character designs, don’t stand out in a way that compliments the narrative. Phillips is an experienced pro at keeping the action clear, and the pace tight. But with so much resting on mounting dread, the images are almost too clear, like a camera left idle as events happen rather than moving with the point-of-view in the scene.

  Houses of the Unholy is a fun ride with interesting ideas to work with. Jacob Phillips contributes solid color work and is key to the tone of the book. But the script feels like it’s rushing to the end without much time to live with the ideas Brubaker wants to discuss. While Sean Phillips is a versatile artist, there simply isn’t any proper horror or scares in the book. Much like Where the Body Was, this is another shot at experimentation from the comics duo but it doesn’t hit the mark it’s aiming for.

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