THE GRAPHIC STYLE OF NOIR: ED BRUBAKER’S CRIMINAL
Books discussed in this essay: Criminal: The Last Of The Innocent (2011) Criminal: Wrong Time, Wrong Place (2016) and Criminal: Bad Night (2009) Criminal: Lawless (2010) Criminal: The Sinners (2015)
all by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Once upon a time, comic book fans would point to the ways the medium’s story-telling could emulate the movies, even back to the Forties, say Will Eisner’s splash pages; the angles of his drawings’ point of view. In the Fifties there was Bernie Krigstein’s famous sequence set in the post-war New York subway, about the encounter between two survivors of concentration camps, drawn for Al Feldstein’s story “Master Race” in the first issue of EC’s Impact. It’s a noirish story, and it’s presented in many ways like a film noir. But it goes beyond that.
Five decades later, Art Spiegelman reviewed a collection of Krigstein’s work in The New Yorker, of all places, and while it’s worth searching that whole review out, one paragraph speaks directly to what impressed me so much about two editions of Criminal, the long running series of graphic novels written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Sean Phllips which I happened to read recently. Spiegelman writes:
The two tiers of wordless staccato panels that climax the story have become justly famous among the comics…
