Criminal: The Deluxe Edition

One-sentence summary: One of the best series of the last decade is only improved by reading several arcs together.

I love noir, and I love Brubaker, so there was never any doubt I'd love Criminal, and I even specifically waited on buying the trades based on the assumption there would be a fancy collection of them eventually. This is one of those books they really cannot make too expensive for me, as it's always worth every penny.

The one thing that stood out to me so starkly when reading this collection is how well the universe knits together when the arcs are taken as one long story, Sin City-like. You learn families and histories; you see the old become young, the son become the father, the cynic become the hopeful. By setting the first story in the present and a later arc in the past, so that all those metamorphoses are in the reverse, takes the foreboding sense that the inevitability would present and transforms it into an empty resignation, which fits noir so well.

Sean Philips' art is like this impossible optical illusion, where regardless of the medium it always looks like it's made for it. On big pages with shiny glossiness all the darknesses pop, but I can totally see it looking equally amazing cheaply printed on cheap paper: faded, almost grimy, analogous the overly-artificial use of light in noir flicks.

The bonuses included in this edition are pretty solid. Nothing jaw-dropping, but enough to make me appreciate it. My personal favorite was something I'd never seen before: apparently they had put together a "trailer" for the first arc by taking some individual panels and having a couple pages of them. I don't know if they're the first to do it (neither are they) but it's a very cool idea that I'd like to see as an occasional alternative to the two current methods (giant splash page ads that are essentially a cover, or the first 5 or so pages stuck at the back of a book). For the purists, they don't have any of the essays that were contributed to the individual issues, as they had been freely given and so they felt iffy about reproducing them. I was a bit sad about it -- I mean, Patton Oswalt, my favorite comedian, wrote one of them -- but it's completely reasonable, so I don't mind.

There's so much to love about a book like Criminal. I love the artistic audacity they have: they're so willing to do interesting, new things but they never make a deal of it. The four issues that are all about a single night, each one readable as a standalone but all needed to get a complete picture of what happened, in particular stands out. A friend mentioned one technique I had noticed but not realized the novelty of: a character gets black-out drunk once, and to illustrate this there are fully black panels followed by a panel of action, jumping from scene to scene as we only get the perspective of flawed memory. So cool...just so damn cool.

That really sums up this book, and this whole series: just so damn cool.