By Steve Baxi — In the Letters Pages to Friday, Ed Brubaker joked that the series was a Post-YA story, even though “Post-YA” would simply be “A.” While that’s technically true, I can’t think of a better way to describe this series which functions as an epilogue to years of Young Adult adventures without going quite into proper adulthood. Friday by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martín, and Muntsa Vicente follows former child detective, Friday Fitzhugh (a reference to YA novelist Louise Fitzhugh) as she returns to the small New England town of King’s Hill with her former partner, Lancelot Jones. The series marries the tropes and style of YA detective novels like Encyclopedia Brown and Lewis Barnavelt with Brubaker’s signature exploration of nostalgia, the nuances of aging and the price of love.

Friday’s opening act, The First Day of Christmas, is a triumph in humanist storytelling that sets up an eerie lovecraftian mystery in the spirit of Stephen King. Martín’s art and Vicente’s colors combine to create provocative images through creative layouts that are just as engaging as the dialogue and mystery itself. Brubaker once again explores familiar themes but from a unique perspective that rivals any of his previous collaborations.

Friday is similar in framing to Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ 2011 story, The Last of the Innocent, from the pages of Criminal. There, they examined the tropes and themes of Archie comics from the perspective of nostalgia and lost youth. Similarly, in Friday, Brubaker takes the anti-social subtext of YA detective novels and carves out a mystery that engages with the awkwardness of aging. In the context of YA novels, a childhood spent battling the supernatural, deceitful adults, and uncovering buried truth is presented as a comforting escape for otherwise powerless children, especially in our Post-Truth, pandemic world where the burden of society’s moral instincts are thrust upon powerless, doomed children. Indeed, it was this very comfort in YA novels that inspired Brubaker to create this series with Martín. At the same time, these novels sparked our imaginations and harken back to days spent in the library catching up on dozens of stories that filled our youth with excitement. Brubaker explores both how one can’t go through these experiences without conflicted feelings about their world and their crime-solving partners while also paying respect to the awe and allure of nostalgia for our childhood. 

We spend our childhood fighting monsters, but what do we do when the only monsters left to battle are our own emotions? As Lance opines, how can we know what our feelings truly are when we haven’t been exposed to anything different? Are we in love with the world we’re in because it’s the only one we know? Or is there something more that we’re tapping into when we go through trauma after trauma with our friends? As Friday and Lancelot wrestle with their troubled relationship, the narrative carefully shows us both the power of facing down the world with our partners while leaving room to dreadfully ask: Is this all we are? As the curtain closes on our youth, are we growing up or running away?

Alongside Pulp and Destroy All Monsters, Brubaker is once again crafting a new era of work that takes seriously the variety of meaning we can derive from our experiences depending on our age. How important is sexual experimentation, freedom, stability and routine? Well it all depends on how old you are. And as we former teenage detectives grow up, how do we relate to these struggles? What is the YA detective perspective on coming home from college? These meditations come from a place of conflict inherent to YA novels. They raise questions about how YA stories are set up and the patterns in their narratives that we take for granted, like how one can expect to trust any adult after spending all their schooldays uncovering the evils of adult figures. Brubaker isn’t criticizing these tropes, he’s merely allowing them to grow under a new light.

 In that sense, Friday is a work of deconstruction. What Brubaker seems to understand is that the principle philosophy of a deconstruction is that it’s less a style of storytelling in itself, and moreso a revealing of what a text is already doing. As in, a book is naturally filled with contradictions, and conflicting interpretations: I say a book is about hope, someone else might say it’s about hopelessness. And because of this, the work is always deconstructing itself, it's always at odds with aspects of itself that we sometimes miss. Brubaker allows those natural cracks in the frame of each genre he writes in to reveal themselves to us. The YA tropes here are not condemned, but allowed to flourish into conflicts inherent to the genre already, conflicts about community, the nature of partnerships, and the distrust of authority.

Martín and Vicente are critical to the success of this series as they carry the burden of establishing Friday as an epilogue to a series of YA detective novels that don’t actually exist. Through splash pages, we see the variety of book covers and alliterative titles to six years of adventures shared by Friday and Lancelot. At the same time, the community of King’s Hill is well established and brimming with its own history. The tricky balance of lush white snow and colorful buildings is able to convey both the emotional distance between this community and Friday, while also subtly providing little familiarities like the geography of the woods that imply a history we never have to see to believe.

Martín’s art is at a career high as he provides thoughtful animation to each character’s expressions. Friday, while dealing with nostalgia and dread, still has some warmth behind her eyes, conveying a sense of hope. Her youthful idealism may not be quite gone. This is a book very much designed around Martín’s particular skills, as very few artists are capable of drawing compelling teen protagonists from the world of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys while allowing them to be at home with witches and occult magics. In contrast to Sean Phillips who usually relies on stark shadows and landscapes to scale the emotions of his characters, Martín focuses on close ups of faces, plants and animals. He gives the story a kind of naturalism that Phillips' work tends to avoid.

Friday was constructed as a digital-first series that does not follow the traditional rules of single issue comics with their final page cliffhangers and strict 22-pages. The page count varies from issue to issue, and small moments in the script like Friday sledding down a hill turn into meditative splash pages that allow the town of King’s Hill to feel so much bigger than what we’re seeing right now. While still paced like a typical Brubaker story, there’s room for Martín to improvise the moments that matter to him artistically as the plot is less important than the life breathed into each individual scene.

Perhaps this is a predictable statement, but Friday Book One - The First Day of Christmas is an incredible start to what is sure to be an incredible series. It’s at once refreshing and important to see Brubaker’s work rendered by someone other than Sean Phillips not only for the sake of variety but to see what the essential features of his writing are and how much does his relationship to the artist change those features. In that way, this is an almost academically important contrast to the aforementioned Last of the Innocent. However, all that jargon aside, this is just a damn good story and captures the tragedy and heart of why we love kids solving crimes, while asking us to question our own nostalgic bubbles. Friday is everything I’ve come to love in Brubaker, but it's equally a victory lap for Martín and Vicente who have never been better.

Trade Collection Review: Friday Book One - The First Day of Christmas

Friday Book One - The First Day of Christmas 
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Marcos Martín
Colorist: Muntsa Vicente
Publisher: Image Comics
Price: $14.99
Collected in print for the first time—a young adult detective hero finally grows up in the first volume of this genre-defying, post-YA masterpiece from award-winning creators ED BRUBAKER (RECKLESS, FRIEND OF THE DEVIL, PULP, KILL OR BE KILLED) and MARCOS MARTIN (THE PRIVATE EYE, Daredevil).
Friday Fitzhugh spent her childhood solving crimes and digging up occult secrets with her best friend Lancelot Jones, the smartest boy in the world. But that was the past. Now she’s in college, starting a new life on her own—or so she thought. When Friday comes home for the holidays, she’s immediately pulled back into Lance’s orbit and finds that something very strange and dangerous is happening in their little New England town…
This is literally the Christmas vacation from Hell, and they may not survive to see the New Year.
Collects FRIDAY #1-3
Publication Date: November 3, 2021
Pre-Order Info: Friday Book One - The First Day of Christmas

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Steve Baxi has a Masters in Ethics and Applied Philosophy, with focuses in 20th Century Aesthetics and Politics. Steve creates video essays and operates a subscription based blog where he writes on pop culture through a philosophy lens. He tweets through @SteveSBaxi.