By Zack Quaintance — The second of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips straight-to-book market graphic novel series, Reckless, hit earlier this year with the arrival of the aptly-named Friend of the Devil — A Reckless Book. And friends? I absolutely love these graphic novels. I could easily write another 500 words or so about how well-made these comics are, about Brubaker’s understated but clear characterization, about Sean Phillips untouchable noir cartooning (colored here by his son, Jacob Phillips), and about the duo’s finely-honed ability to make crime comics.

This is unsurprisingly a very well-made book, but there’s something just a bit below the surface in Reckless that I find it far more interesting to write about. So many crime comics are interested in showing readers the worst of what people are capable of, of what we do to each other, and of the reasons we find for why. Maybe they do it with a little suspense, maybe they do it with some dark humor (see Stray Bullets), but it’s almost always just a bit surface level. And, to be sure, the Reckless books do all of that (except for the humor, again, see Stray Bullets).

But they also do so much more. These Reckless books are interested in showing you why society does evil to people. Or at least drawing a through-line between decades to show you the progression of heinous behavior. That’s what’s for sale in this second volume especially. The book starts with the opening tag — 1985 was a bad year. And it goes on to show you bad things that happened in 1985, but it goes further than that. This book pulls 1985 out like a stubborn weed and shows you its vast network of soiled roots.

Using its engaging California pulp noir story — a young woman’s step sister went to Hollywood to become an actress and just disappeared — Friend of the Devil ultimately detail a series of events that span back to World War II, progress to the ideals of the hippie movement, get twisted in the satanic panic ‘70s, and ultimately end up in the greed is good harsh lights of the 1980s. Those are the broad strokes anyway, and really the best I can do without spoiling too much.

The other main takeaway I had from this book is that the Reckless series still has a lot of ground left to cover. Now, I don’t think this is a story built for dozens of books, like some kind of pop fiction CIA agent or whatever. But I do think it has some more interests to explore, and I could see the titular Ethan Reckless continuing to age, progressing along with the series thematic interests into the ‘90s, ‘00s, ‘10s, and even the ‘20s.

In fact, some of the ideas that the book explored in this second story seemed already bending that way, namely the way hate evolves and festers, finding other tracks to occupy while it bides its time to manifest in other moments. That’s a very 2021 idea in itself, and I’d be excited to see how our ex-FBI agent who now works as a PI out of a shuddered SoCal movie house would be swept up in it.

GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEW: Friend of the Devil - A Reckless Book

Friend of the Devil - A Reckless Book
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Sean Phillips
Colorist: Jacob Phillips
Publisher: Image Comics
Bestselling crime noir masters ED BRUBAKER and SEAN PHILLIPS are back with another new original graphic novel featuring troublemaker-for-hire Ethan Reckless.
It's 1985, and things in Ethan's life are going pretty well...until a missing woman shows up in the background of an old B-movie, and Ethan is drawn into Hollywood's secret occult underbelly as he hunts for her among the wreckage of the wild days of the '70s.
Price: $19.99
More Info: Friend of the Devil - A Reckless Book

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Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.