By Bruno Savill De Jong — Partway through Cruel Summer – a collected storyline from the most recent volume of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ critically-acclaimed Criminal – juvenile delinquent Ricky Lawless harasses some police-officers out of repressed frustration. As Ricky feels, the narration informs us, “this was when Ricky Lawless felt most alive… When he was running from trouble he had caused. Running from consequence… You existed in the breeze and the laughter and the chase. Not knowing if you would make it or not. Yet never feeling more free”.

Cruel Summer is full of people on the run. Dan Farraday is a private investigator who specializes in ‘hunting’ people. The woman he’s chasing, Jane, herself “spent most of her life running” from a sense of inevitable doom, “trying to feel alive, like it’s an act of defiance”. And Teeg Lawless (Jane’s lover and Ricky’s dad) also lives by the edge of his teeth, finding a precarious happiness in Jane he relentlessly pursues, the book commenting “Teeg Lawless was in love, and it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him”. Criminal’s characters are crooks, obviously – even Farraday has demons of his own – but the series is so compelling by placing you inside their mindset, able to detect their impending destruction but unable to stop themselves running towards it.

Brubaker is a veteran of crime stories and comics in general (as is noted in my Gotham Central series). Criminal is truly the epitome of his abilities, not only in his grounded characterizations and hard-boiled narration, but his curiously understated humanism; his ability to make you care about otherwise unlikeable people. Cruel Summer’s wonderful narration weaves in and out of focalization. It gets close enough to understand the character’s perspectives, but stays distant enough to see their flaws. Really, despite its fast pace, Cruel Summer has surprisingly little plot. Instead many sequences simply observe the characters go about their lives with some underlying narration, often including full-paged closeups of them. Cruel Summer never breaks its immersive and realistic presentation, but manages to convey a full portrait of these players, keeping it focused on the ‘criminals’ instead of just the ‘crime’.

Like Brubaker, Sean Phillips’ magnificent artwork has already received wide acclaimed. Phillips’ figures are so well calculated, always being believable and hardened people, but with enough detail and expression to carry a scene. Reading through Cruel Summer, they never feel stiff, but as alive and vivid as their squalid surroundings (another aspect Phillips’ ‘noir’ stylings nails). Phillips says so much with shadows and scowls and cigarettes, but never too much. He is aided by his son, Jacob Phillips, on colors. Cruel Summer contains an impressive range, from the more subdued coloring during conversations, to the heightened gradients that appear during moments of intensity. Teeg’s talk with his ex-partner’s widow has this soft pink overlay, while Ricky’s late-night encounter with a security guard shifts from a panicked red to a cool purple hue as he reclaims control.

Cruel Summer is similar to Bad Weekend, the previous collection of this volume of Criminal. By collecting these separate story-arcs (which feature different people and places), the issues are essentially transformed into stand-alone Graphic Novels. Somehow, despite my deep love of Brubaker, this is my first time actually reading Criminal, but it was still extremely accessible. Yet Brubaker also mentions that Cruel Summer is somewhat a ‘prequel’ for the first Criminal story, Coward. So Cruel Summer is perfect reading for both long-time fans and newcomers, and an absolute necessity for readers of crime-comics. I can imagine that, like the characters, once you fall into the world of Criminal, you cannot help but be drawn further in.

Cruel Summer HC - REVIEW

Cruel Summer HC
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist/Letterer: Sean Phillips
Colorist: Jacob Phillips
Publisher: Image
Price: $34.99
BRUBAKER & PHILLIPS’ CRIMINAL epic, collected in a gorgeous oversized deluxe edition hardback.In the summer of ’88, Teeg Lawless comes home to plan the biggest heist of his career. But Teeg’s son Ricky and his friends are starting down the same dark path their fathers are on, and this is about to become the worst summer of their lives. An epic tale of tragedy handed down from generation to generation, CRUEL SUMMER is a crime comic masterpiece from the most celebrated noir masters in the industry, creators of CRIMINAL, FATALE, KILL OR BE KILLED, and THE FADE OUT. Collects CRIMINAL #1 and #5-12 in a beautiful new hardback edition with additional behind-the-scenes material
Release Date: September 16, 2020

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Bruno Savill De Jong is a recent undergraduate of English and freelance writer on films and comics, living in London. His infrequent comics-blog is Panels are Windows and semi-frequent Twitter is BrunoSavillDeJo.