Criminal

There's a lot to love about Ed Brubaker right now--his Uncanny X-Men, his Captain America, his Daredevil--but what I love about him most of all is his versatility.

He's able to hop from superspy espionage to hypersuperheroics and then land right square back where his career truly took off--with hard-edged noir crime comics.

That's what Criminal is all about--the seedy underbelly of society, the hard-luck riff raff who fill dank bars on the wrong side of town and try to scrape out an existence breaking various laws.

Brubaker knows this genre, and he knows this world--he's been here before, on Sleeper, which stirred a dose of superheroics into the noir suspense genre. Criminal has no superheroes, and not really any heroes at all--it's more of a book about superantiheroes, men and women you want to root for, but who destroy themselves, time and again, with their inability to escape the circumstances where they rot.

Sean Phillips is Brubaker's ideal artistic foil, extracting every ounce of drama and atmosphere from Brubaker's script that is there, and lots more besides. Also great are the various extras that appear in each issue, like reviews of classic noir films or essays on the genre.

As a mainstream superhero writer, Ed Brubaker is at the top of his game--yet as shocking as this may be to say, his greatest work may just be taking place in Criminal, on the fringes of that mainstream. It's where he can cut loose and indulge his murkiest noir fantasies.