Dave-El's Book Report: Night Fever by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips

It's time for another edition of Dave-El's Book Report where I post about books I've read.

It's not much more complicated than that.

Today's book is not a prose novel but a graphic novel by favorite creators.  

Writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips have been my jam for some time now. With projects like Criminal, Fatale, The Fade Out and Kill or Bill Killed, Brubaker and Phillips are experts at reinventing film noir as comic art. 

A few years back, the Brubaker/Phillips team decided to forego the serialized format of what we still call comic books to produce original graphic novels.  

Today's book is a good example of why that career move was a good idea. Today we're going to talk about Night Fever.  

Our protagonist is not a knight errant like Ethan Reckless or a doomed criminal like the starcrossed Lawless family. 

 

Jonathan Webb is what he appears to be, an average middle aged man with a wife and 2.5 kids with a house in the suburbs, living the American dream in 1970's America.

But is there more to Webb that what we see? 

Webb is a book salesman on a trip to an expo in Paris when he is confronted by a memory, an image from his past.  While reading a manuscript for a forthcoming book from his publisher,  Webb is stunned to find the author has detailed a dream, a fever dream of terrible and frightening imagery that evokes in Webb a specific dream that used to plague him.  

This recollection of this savage dream haunts Webb and he can't sleep.  Restless and frustrated, he leaves his hotel room to roam the streets of Paris.  He happens upon a young couple and acting an impulse he doesn't understand, he follows them to a party.  

It's a costumed bacchanal pulsing with light and music, powered by drugs and sex. 

Catching a name on the guest list, Webb introduces himself as Griffin. He's given a mask and entry to the party.

It's all a bit overwhelming for a an average middle aged man with a wife and 2.5 kids and a house in the suburbs.  But something is stirring in Webb.  

When he was a younger man, he was not quite the responsible adult he grew up to be and this party is speaking to that person he used to be.  But the person he has grown up to be is not quite ready for this. 

That's when Ranier shows up to be his guide.  

Ranier is a mysterious man, prone to odd philisophical insights and bursts of violence, yet strangely compelling. Perhaps Webb would have better judgement than to follow Ranier down whatever rabbit hole he's being lead but he's living Griffin's life now. 

There's more partying where Webb gets drugged and he's pretty sure he sees a bare breasted alien woman with multiple arms and blue skin. With Ranier, he also finds himself involved in burglary, espionage, assault and a car chase from the Parisian police.  

Also the writer who related Webb's old fever dream in his latest manuscript is found dead in his hotel room at the expo. Did he kill himself? Did Ranier kill him? Oh fuck! Did Webb kill him? Or was it "Griffin"?   

What we get in Night Fever is a man in a total free fall out of the safety of middle American comfort into a swirl of sex and violence, challenging Jonathan Webb's perception of reality and his own sense of self. 

Artist Sean Phillips does what he does best, taking a subject that should be near impossible for a graphic artist to illustrate, a man's growing psychological tension and emotional despair and make it real on the page, make it move and evoke  what Webb is going through.  

The art gets experimental when Webb experiences his mind trip and sees the bare breasted alien woman with multiple arms and blue skin.  But Phillips varies his layouts, tight near claustrophobic panels when Webb is alone with his mental anguish and more open designs in scenes with physical violence and mental upheaval.  

And a shout out to Sean's son Jacob who provides the color art, working with a palate of different color schemes to evince the mood of each scene.  

And what Ed Brubaker has written defies categorization. In the afterward, even Ed isn't sure how the particular story bubbled from the recesses of this brain. There are story elements from crime novels, horror fiction and psychedelic explorations. 

Or it's just the tale of an average middle aged man with a wife and 2.5 kids and a house in the suburbs confronting a mid-life crisis in the absolute worst way possible. 

The Brubaker/Phillips team have two graphic novels coming out for 2024, a crime drama Where the Body Was (coming out hthis week) and a horror outing called Houses of the Unholy (this summer).  

I am looking forward to them and I will write about them here.