If you’re looking for happy endings or uplifting messages about the human condition, Criminal isn’t for you. They have fun!Īny fun that Brubaker’s criminals enjoy is a short-lived uptick on their downward spiral to despair and disaster.

They experience horror, but they mostly enjoy being on the wrong side of the law and doing what they do. Things don’t end well for delusional and damaged detective dude.Ĭriminal influenced my approach to storytelling when I started writing fiction, but the criminals I write about revel in their lawless lifestyles. This approach amplifies the feeling that all events are connected and inevitable.

You also see certain events from multiple perspectives-sometimes from issue to issue, and sometimes from story to story. Through it all, narrative captions tend to focus on one character’s internal experience or monologue per issue, sometimes describing the action that appears in the panels, but more often a step removed from the story that Phillips tells visually, giving insight into what characters are thinking or feeling. Someone who dies in one story might appear years earlier in another. You might meet someone in one story, then discover their childhood in another. The stories feature numerous recurring characters connected by the strands of their web of crime, and the stories are not delivered in chronological order. You can read any one of the self-contained stories on its own or, as Brubaker often says, in any order at all. You can gawk at a fictional train wreck and not feel guilty.Ĭriminal is also a remarkable feat of storytelling.

Maybe Criminal channels that aspect of human experience into fiction where it’s safe, where no one really gets hurt. It’s probably the part of our minds that is responsible for slasher flicks and so-called “disaster porn”, the part that craves horror and violence even in otherwise well-adjusted people who normally avoid such things. That sick part of our monkey brains that slows down to see the carnage until the road is backed up with gawkers for miles. Maybe my fascination with the series is related to that part of the human mind that can’t resist looking at a crash on the highway. Things don’t end well for delusional and damaged downtrodden dame.

Sean phillips criminal