From
the back cover
“Three
stories interweave to tell a tragic tale in The Dead and the Dying. A
beautiful but damaged woman returns home with nothing but vengeance on her
mind, and two best friends, one of the son of the city’s crime kingpin, are
caught in the crossfire in this gritty, ‘70s noir from noir masters Ed Brubaker
and Sean Phillips.”
Review
Brubaker
and Phillips shake up the structure of their previous two Criminal volumes
by fracturing it into a character-sharing portmanteau work, one that serves as
a prequel to Coward and Lawless. Like those books, this is
hardboiled, terse, character-deep and violent, with sex and betrayal prominent
in the mix.
“Second
Chance in Hell” focuses on the relationship between boxer Jake “Gnarly” Brown─who
will later become a bartender at the Undertown, a.k.a. the Undertow─and
Sebastian Hyde, his rich son-of-a-criminal-kingpin boyhood friend. Set in 1972,
Hyde’s betrayal of his girlfriend (and Brown’s crush-object), Danica Briggs,
sets off a series of events that form the impetus of Dying.
“A
Wolf Among Wolves”: 1972. Teeg Lawless, Vietnam vet and father of Tracy and
Ricky (who are key characters in Lawless), tries to do right by his
family and adjust to civilian life, but it isn’t in his nature. This tale
offers a character-rich wrinkle to the memories that Tracy speaks of in Lawless,
deepening the overall works.
“The
Female of the Species”: Danica Briggs shows her journey from a naïve girl
to a hardened hustler out for revenge and escape. Her fate, prior to “Female,”
is already established in the two previous stories, making this all the more
heartbreaking.
Followed
by Criminal: Bad Night.
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