Monday, February 03, 2020

Criminal: Lawless by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

(pb; 2015: graphic novel, collects issues 6-10 of the comic book series Criminal)

From the back cover

“Twenty years ago, Tracy Lawless escaped the crime-ridden streets of the city for a life in the military, and never look back. But not his past is dragging him home from the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan, to find out who left his brother lying dead in an alley. As he digs through the wreckage of his family history, infiltrating the underworld life his brother Rick lived, the one thing Tracy has going for him is that no one knows who the hell he is anymore, and what they don’t know just might kill them. . “


Review

Lawless spiral-expands the world introduced in the first Criminal graphic novel, Coward. Like Coward, Lawless is a pulpy, terse, character-interesting and sometimes violent work that uses the Undertown bar, a.k.a. the Undertow, as its central location. Not only that, this second volume has mentions of or cameos by characters seen in the first graphic novel. This is a great expansion of Criminal, one worth reading. Followed by Criminal: The Dying and the Dead.

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