Dave-El's Book Report: Five Gears In Reverse

It's been awhile since I've done a book report post. 

The Thursday spot has been dedicated to comics.

You might argue that since the book in question is told with pictures of people talking in word balloons, it's still comics.

Since this is a new hard cover production from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, I will insist this is a BOOK and if you wanna call it comics, well, you can fuck right off.

Let's get into Five Gears In Reverse.

This latest installment by Brubaker & Phillips takes place in their Criminal universe of mobsters vying for supremecy in Bay City and the hapless luck deficient Lawless family who flit along the edges of the crime families who run things.  

The focus falls on Ricky Lawless, son of the near legendary Teeg Lawless. Ricky has inherited his father's unfortunate knack for getting into trouble but Ricky is deficient in Teeg's luck for getting out of that trouble.    

Karl calls Ricky.  He wants his goddam money.  

Ricky's in the hole to the bookie for 25 grand.  Karl gives Ricky a tip on a job that will more than net the money he owes. 

All Ricky has to do is show up at the right place at the right time and a big satchel of money will fall right into his lap.

Of course the job is too easy and after many, many questionable decisions by Ricky Lawless, the job goes down with considerable violence ending in murder.  

Without Ricky getting the promised haul.  

With girlfriend Mallory in tow, Ricky robs a liquor store that is a front for the Santini crime family.  

Once more, the old Ricky Lawless bad luck kicks in.  Ricky's score is lost, Mallory gets badly injured and Ricky winds up in the crosshairs of the big man Arno Santini himself.

In order to save Mallory and himself, Ricky takes a low effort,high risk job out of town on behalf of Santini to deal with a rival syndicate. 

Well, that goes badly. 

Looks like Mallory and Ricky are gonna die but Ricky pleads for one last chance to do something for Santini to spare their lives.

So it turns out there is some business Ricky can help Arno Santini take care of.

Ricky takes a high effort,even higher risk on behalf of Santini to take revenge on Sebastian Hyde, Bay City's other, bigger and badder mob boss. 

All Ricky has to do is murder Chester, Hyde's top enforcer.

Chester didn't make it to the top of Sebastian Hyde's criminal network without being very good at what he does.

Ricky weighs his options and decides his best chance of keeping Mallory and himself alive.

Is to make another deal.  

SPOILER:  Ricky and Mallory will escape Arno Santini.

SPOILER #2: Arno Santini will not escape Chester's wrath.

And the book ends with Ricky and Mallory safe and sound despite their misadventures rife with bad decisions and lousy luck.

Except....

Karl calls Ricky.  He still wants his goddam money. 

Well, fuck! 

With Five Gears In Reverse, Ed Brubaker writes a tight, twisted tale of Ricky Lawless in a cycle of ever escalating peril fraught with bad luck, bad decisions and bad impulses.  

While the focus is mostly on Ricky, Brubaker does spend some time on Mallory's backstory, a terrible tale of torment and loss. Mallory is the best thing to ever happen to Ricky but any positive influence she has on Mr.Lawless is mitigated by her own propensity for bad luck, bad decisions and bad impulses. 

Brubaker has an amazing gift for dialogue and internal narration. Brubaker's script is laced with flashes of dark humor as he paints a picture of growing danger and despair.   

Artist Sean Phillips is on point with some of his best artwork, conveying the dark moods of a classic film noir.  With his son Jacob providing color, Sean conveys intensity in people talking as well as explosions of graphic and brutal violence.  

Over the course of various Criminal books, we've watched Ricky Lawless grow from a child to an adult, trapped in the same spiral that consumed Teeg Lawless, his father.  

With Five Gears In Reverse, we witness the epitome of Ricky's evolution into truly his father's son.  

Only with even worse luck than dear old dad.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

The world of Criminal will be moving from graphic novels to television with a new TV series set to debut on Amazon Prime later this year with Ed Brubaker as writer and producer. 

The TV series will continue to explore the criminal underworld of Bay City and more misadventures of Ricky and Mallory. 

Dave-El's Book Report: The Knives by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips

 

Hey, I think I'll post about a book and yeah, it's another graphic novel by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

I know you think these things are just fershlugginer comic books but these Brubaker/Phillips creations transcend that medium.

Take away the pretty (and not so pretty) pictures and you've got a novel on par with writers like Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake.

Today's book from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips is called The Knives and it's set in their Criminal universe.

First of all, what the heck is Criminal? 

Criminal is a loosely connected series of comics and novels about  different characters that inhabit the same world in fictional Center City.  They all hang out in the same bar and share a common history of multiple generations of crime.

A common thread throughout the narrative of these Criminal books is the Lawless family.  Some member of the Lawless clan will factor is as the protagonist of a particular story and other times are just present as a supporting character to someone else's narrative.  

Most of the Criminal stories are set in the past, primarily in the 1970's and '80's.  

The Knives brings the world of Criminal into the 21st century.

The Knives begins with Jacob Kurtz, the main character from  from the Criminal story called Bad Night.  

Jacob's the writer/artist of the Frank Kafka, P.I. newspaper comic strip which has appeared in various volumes of Criminal in the past.  Frank Kafka, P.I. has been picked up as a TV series which earns Jacob a relocation to Hollywood, a producer credit, a seat in the writer's room and with absolutely nothing to do. 

Showrunner Dan Rails has his own agenda on Frank Kafka, P.I. The TV Series and it's all shit, understanding nothing of what Jacob created.  

There's a 2 page sequence where Jacob is having what he thinks is a productive conversation with Dan on ways to make the TV show better. Only to find the conversation was one-sided, that Dan was on his Bluetooth talking to someone else about something else the whole time.  

One positive for Jacob is he reconnects with his Aunt Suzy, whose husband wrote B-movies. She decides to leave Jacob her huge place in the Hollywood Hills if he promises not to sell it or break it up.

Another positive in Jacob's life is his relationship with Dan's assistant, Karma. She's beautiful, witty, smart, empathetic and sexy as hell.

And she's playing Jacob for a sucker.

Next thing Jacob knows he's across the desk from Dan Rails being blackmailed into signing away all his rights to Frank Kafka, P.I. The TV Series or Karma will sue Jacob for sexual harrassment. 

Jacob slinks back to Center City but what does it really matter.

Frank Kafka, P.I. The TV Series is cancelled after 8 episodes.

It made the list for an article called "Shows That SHOULD Be Cancelled Too Soon".  

Meanwhile and elsewhere, at the Undertow bar, Angie Watson is on a downward spiral.  

Angie's erstwhile guardian Gnarly (aka Jake Brown) is dying of cancer.  The head of the Hyde crime family gave Gnarly the Undertow bar and the apartment over it. After Gnarly dies, the current boss, Brandon Hyde, refuses to keep any promises his father made to Gnarly and kicks Angie out of the bar and the apartment.  

Angie's tale intersects with Jacob when a mutual friend asks Jacob to give Angie a place to stay for a while.  

Angie flits in and out of Jacob's life for awhile.  At least one stay lasts a bit longer when the COVID pandemic hits in 2020.  But she resumes disappearing for a stretches of time until she returns to Jacob's home badly beaten.  

She's been breaking in to Brandon Hyde's penthouse apartment in revenge for kicking her out of the Undertow.

Hyde has his thugs beat up Angie in revenge for daring to think she could get revenge on him.

It's some messed up shit.

And Angie's assault is not the only problem facing Jacob.

And someone has kidnapped Jacob’s Aunt Suzy and is demanding a ransom he doesn’t have.

Jacob realizes he needs some muscle.

Time to reach out to some old contacts in the old gang of crooks.

Well, we can't have a Criminal story without someone from the Lawless family.

Tracy Lawless agrees to help Jacob with the kidnapping problem.

And once that's settled, Tracy Lawless and Brandon Hyde are gonna come to an understanding about Angie.

While a lot about The Knives is built on the foundation laid in previous Criminal stories, this new graphic novel stands firmly on it's own. It's enough to know these characters do have a prior history but the details of that history are not fundermentally crucial to understanding what's going on.

Ed Brubaker crafts an expansive tale of different characters and perspectives that come together in a satisfying resolution. These people are fucked up in ways we're all fucked up.  Just worse.

Well, I hope it's worse. If your life is as fucked up as Jacob and Angie, well, you really got problems.  

And Sean Phillips illustrates this story with with his usual attention to gritty detail and grim shadows. And his son Jacob Phillips colors the book with a varied palate of the gauldy pastels of life in Hollywood and darker hues of blue, orange and purple of real and metaphorical darkness.  

The Knives is perhaps the strongest Brubaker/Phillips collaboration since Reckless - Follow Me Down. 

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We're back tomorrow with a Christmas holiday themed Your Friday Video Link.   

Dave-El's Book Report: Drowned Hopes by Donald Westlake

Today is the anniversary of the birth of arguably my favorite author, Donald Westlake who was born on this date in 1933. 

Earlier today I posted a Movie Time edition which looked at 2 movies adapted from Westlake books. 

This edition of Dave-El's Book Report is about one of my favorite books in Westlake's John Dortmunder series, Drowned Hopes.

A little background on John Dortmunder. John is a thief, a very clever one but he typically keeps to low level scores, just enough to keep the lights on and the rent paid. No guns, no muss, no fuss. 

Dortmunder is described as tall, with stooped shoulders and "lifeless thinning hair-colored hair" and has a disreputable "hangdog" face; he rarely smiles.  

His robberies are not big enough not to draw too much attention from the New York City cops.

Occasionally, he's not eluded the police and spent a couple of stretches in prison.

In Drowned Hopes, one of those times Dortmunder spent as a guest of the state has come back to haunt him.  Former cellmate Tom Jimson is out of prison for his 70th birthday and pays Dortmunder a visit. 

Jimson is a cold, visicious son of a bitch who is looking to get the $700,000 he stole and hid before he was sent to prison 30 years ago.  

Jimson buried the money behind a library in a small town in upstate New York.  

The town and the library are still there.

But underwater.  

It seems in the intervening years during Jimson's incarceration, the state built a dam and a reservoir has formed over the tiny little hamlet where the dastardly crook buried his stolen money.

Jimson needs Dortmunder's help to get the money with the following plan.

Step one: blow up the dam 

Step two: after the reservoir drains, dig up the loot. 

There are two things about this plan that disturb Dortmunder:

• Between Step One and Step Two, the towns in the valley will be flooded when the reservoir breaks and thousands will die.
• Jimson is NOT disturbed by that. As long as he gets his money, who cares?  

Knowing that Jimson will go forward with the "blow up the dam" scheme with or without him, Dortmunder convinces the old sociopath to give him some time to work an alternative plan.

So Dortmunder assembes the usual gang to work up a plan.

Couple of obstacles.

• Dortmunder and friends are urbanites through and through so they will be out of their element in buccolic upstate New York.
• Dortmunder can't swing and is deathly afraid of water. 

Dortmunder assembles his crew of eternally optimistic Andy Kelp, genial, car obsessed Stan Murch and man mountain "Tiny" Bulcher as they deal with the culture clash between upstate New York and their native NYC.   

"If we stay here much longer, we'll start buying one another birthday cards.''

Dortmunder's gang pursue various options for trying to get the loot without Tom Jimson blowing up van. Also taking into account Dortmunder does not know how to swim. 

One option is to simply walk to the library. 

Using scuba gear, Dortmunder can walk into the reservoir following the old abandoned rail line that passed right behind the library in the now underwater town. 

Seems simple.

It's not. 

Well, something's gotta work as Jimson is getting antsier about just blowing up the frickin' damn already. 

Drowned Hopes is the longest of the Dortmunder novels that is faithful to the classic Dortmunder formula but provides some unique challenges to that formula.   

Sadly Donald Westlake passed away on December 31, 2008 and is no longer with us. But he produced some of the most clever comic crime novels I've ever read.

 

Dave-El's Book Report: Houses of the Unholy

As is my frequent want here in these posts of Dave-El's Book Report, I will extoll the talents of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips with their series of graphic novels.  

Brubaker and Phillips have carved a successful niche noir crime novels that are engaging and challenging.

I am almost a broken record about how much I enjoy their output.

But today's post....?

Well...

Houses of the Unholy may well be a rare misstep in the Brubaker/Phillips bibliography.   

Natalie Burns is a young woman leading an aimless life, putting some cash in her pocket as a bounty hunter.  

She encounters FBI Agent West who seeks to draw her into his investigation into a sinister conspiracy involving a satanic cult. He's following a trail of dead bodies which are connected to Natalie. 

They were all people from her childhood and they were all caught up in a twist web of allegations involving satanic activities in their home town. 

Via flashbacks, we explore Natalie's childhood where she and some other kids attending a summer camp got caught up in the hysteria of grown ups who just knew the counselors were into some kind of devil worshipping shit. 

Brubaker is tapping into the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980's where God fearing Americans just knew the Devil himself was literally lurking around every corner waiting to pounce.

There are charges, investigations, arrests and trials to root out the truth of this evil lurking ever so close to their precious children. 

The children are told to tell only the truth of what happened at the camp. 

The children also understand what salicious "truth" their parents want to hear. 

The whole thing blows up when under the cold light of day, there's clearing nothing there.

But not before the head counselor, her reputation destroyed, kills herself.

The guilt and grief over her role in this debacle as a child wrecked Natalie, akways on the move, avoiding connections with people, moving as far away as she can from those terrible days.

But now this FBI agent wants to pull her back in. 

Some of the kids from that time convinced themselves there really was a dark and terrible power in the haunted woods outside their summer camp. 

And as adults, they are determined to gain that power for themselves.

Well, it sounds like we got ourselves a real firecracker of a plot, don't we?

But do we have a story?

 People flit in and out of both the present and past narratives to service the plot but leave little impression. 

Agent West is little more than a plot device to get Natalie Burns into the plot.

About a quarter of the way near the end, we're informed Natalie has a brother who we did not know about before and is needed to help Natalie with the next step of her journey. 

His fatal fate at the hands of the satanic conspirators should've landed harder but hey, we just met the guy.  

I think that perhaps Houses of the Unholy may have been better served by a longer structure of being serialized as a comic book series, allowing more time to invest in the characters. Instead everything is compressed into a single graphic novel. 

The book still has flashes of the brilliance we expect from a Brubaker/Phillips production but I think Houses of the Unholy is not the best representation of their work. 

The next time I do a Book Report post, we will delve into the life and time of one Sir Patrick Stewart.

Dave-El's Book Report: The Planetary Omnibus

Before I get to the object of today's post, I want to take a moment to catch up on whatever the hell is going on with Neil Gaiman.

As I wrote about here last year, Gaiman's reputation took quite a hit as multiple allegations were made that he had sexually assaulted women.  

In the intervening months since that post, the picture has not gotten much better for Neil Gaiman. 

Gaiman and his estranged wife, Amanda Palmer, were sued in federal court last month for alleged sexual assault and trafficking by Scarlett Pavlovich, one of the women who made those allegations last year.

Gaiman has produced several text messages with Pavlovich that he says refutes her accusations that her sexual encounters with Gaiman were not consensual. 

Whatever case Neil Gaiman may make in his defense that the cases against him of sexual assault never happened or were actually consensual, it seems the world has come to the conclusion that Gaiman is now persona non grata.  

Projects associated with Gaiman have been cancelled or curtailed all over and even past works, like DC's successful Sandman trades, have become pariahs in the marketplace. 

I'm covering this ground because the book I'm writing about today was written by a once very popular British writer whose rep was ruined by sexual impropriety.

When artist John Cassady died last year,  I realized I never completed reading Planetary, the signature series he created with writer Warren Ellis and so I put the Omnibus on my Christmas list which Andrea got for me.  

Planetary is an organization that exists in a world like our own but all the weird shit that goes down in genre fiction (comic books, sci-fi novels and movies, etc) really does happen but it's all being suppressed and hidden which represses the growth and development of human kind. 

Planetary is on a mission to investigate phenomena associated with alien invaders, mutated lizards, super powered beings, ghost detectives and more.

Their motto: "The world is strange. Let's keep it that way." 

At the core of the narrative is the Planetary field team:

• Elijah Snow, a 100+ year old curmudgeon dragged from self imposed exile to rejoin the world. He has cyrogenic powers that uses in the (excuse the pun) coolest ways.  
• Jakita Wagner, a leather suited femme fatale with super strenght and speed
• The Drummer (no other name), a beatnik with the ability to talk to machines and information is his super power. 

Elijan Snow is the book's center, his wonder at new things to discover and his anger that there are forces in this world who seek to hide these wonders for their own greedy and nefarious purposes.  Elijah is very much a grump gus who tends to infuriate anyone around him immediately but there is no denying his dedicationj, his pursuit of justice, justice for a Planetary member long assumed to be dead and justice for a world kept too long in the dark.   

This book is inventive and thought provoking, a complex and multi-layered journey through a multiverse of possibilities and wonders, of secrets and conspiracies.  

The omnibus includes the Planetary series that ran for 27 issues from April 1999 to October 2009 plus 3 specials that crossed over with The Authority, Justice League and The Batman. 

The two team specials do not do a lot for me but the Batman issue is a bit of fun as Ejijah, Jakita and the Drummer visit a Gotham City that is in a multiversal flux where Batman keeps shifting personas from page to page or even panel to panel. Like from Adam West TV Batman to Frank Miller's dystopian Dark Knight. 

All in all, Planetary is a wonderful display of the terrific talents of Warren Ellis and John Cassady. 

While I knew of Cassady's sad fate from his passing last year, I was somehow unaware of what was up with Warren Ellis. 

Nothing good it seems.

In June 2020, Warren Ellis was accused of "sexual coercion, manipulation, gaslighting and other forms of emotional abuse".

Ellis responded to these accusations that he had not considered that others would see him as having "a position of power and privilege.  I have hurt many people that I had no intention of hurting. I am culpable. I take responsibility for my mistakes. I will do better and for that, I apologize."

While a number of women consider that Ellis has been contrite and genuinely apologetic for his actions, the damage to his rep is considerable enough that he has not had any new comics work published in years.  

Future editions of Dave-El's Book Report will include another graphic novel from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips and I've got Patrick Stewart's memoir on tap as well.  

Dave-El's Book Report: 100 Places to See After You Die by Ken Jennings

It’s time for another edition of DAVE-EL’S BOOK REPORT where I REPORT on a BOOK that I (DAVE-EL) have read.

 

Everybody got that?

 

Anyway…

 

After two editions in a row that focused on graphic novels by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, I promised the next report would be on a book-book.

 

That book is 100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife written by Ken Jennings.   

 Yes, the undisputed Greatest of All Time champion and current host of Jeopardy, that Ken Jennings.   

 

What we have in this book is an amusingly told but thoroughly researched guide to various concepts of the afterlife as posited by various religions, mythologies, books, movies and TV shows. 

 

From Star Trek, want to know more about the Klingon version of the afterlife known as Stovokor? Ken’s got you covered. 

 

While I describe the book at “thoroughly researched”, at only 2 or 3 pages per afterlife, this book is by no means a deep dive into the minutia of these concepts.  Still, there is enough detail present in each segment to provide an interesting and engaging insight into how past and present cultures view what happens after we die. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a more scholarly assessment of post life belief systems, this is not your resource. 

 

Tongue firmly planted in cheek, Ken offers travel guide staples such as:

• Don’t Miss sites
• What to Eat
• Best-to-avoid hints
• Where-to Stay clues

 

Ken has fun with these reviews of the afterlife but he is never disrespectful of anyone’s beliefs.  

 

Ken even pokes at the afterlife of his own Mormon faith. 

 

“Most visions of the world to come…promise endless leisure and luxury. But not so the afterlife envisioned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. As befits their peach-canning, carpool-driving, casserole-delivering image as the industrious honeybees of the American West, Mormons head to the grave prepared to keep on working.” 

 

Ken writes about the depictions of the afterlife in movies and television. His take on the post death world of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey is most righteous and definitely not heinous, dude!

The book can be a bit of a slog. I mean, we have 100 versions of the afterlife to get through.  But overall, Ken’s writing has a deft touch for humor which moves things along. 

 

100 Places to See After You Die: A Travel Guide to the Afterlife is a fun read.  Just don’t wait until after you die to read it.    

 

Dave-El's Book Report: Where the Body Was by Brubaker and Phillips

It has been awhile since the last edition of Dave-El’s Book Report where I posted about Night Fever, a graphic novel  by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

 

So what other books have I read since then? 

 

Today’s edition of Dave-El’s Book Report is a graphic novel  by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

 

For crying out loud, do I not read anything else?

 

As I have read other books (actual book books) and they will one day be the subject of a future post of Dave-El’s Book Report.

 

But today, my attention turns to Where the Body Was by Brubaker and Phillips. 

 

Judging from the title, you might guess since there’s a body and we’ve got ourselves a murder mystery.

 

Not quite.

 

Yes there is a body and there are questions about how the body got dead, how the body got where it was and what not but the questions around the body are almost incidental compared to the larger tableau that Brubaker and Phillips create in this novel. 

 

Brubaker called the story "the strangest and most experimental thing" he and Phillips ever created.

 

And it is. 

 

The story is set in 1984.  Of course it is. Brubaker writing something set in the present day? As if!

 

The novel is a slice of life look at a wound up tight suburban neighborhood called Pelican Road. 

 

• Tommy and Karin squatting in the old rooming house, juvenile delinquents far from home, getting high. 
• They break into homes in the neighborhood, making quick scores for money for drugs and alcohol. 
• Tommy loves Karin. We’re less than clear on Karin thinks of Tommy.  
• There are the Melvilles, Ted the psychiatrist who is almost never home and his wife Toni who almost always is, lonely, neglected, bored.
• And there’s Palmer, man with a badge. People think he’s a cop and he let’s them think that but he’s not. He took the badge from his dead police officer father’s coffin.
• Toni invites Palmer in to alleviate her boredom.
• Meaning lots of fucking going on. 
• Palmer actually grows fond of Toni but worries what will happen if the lie about him being a cop is exposed.  
• Lila Nguyen patrols the neighborhood in a mask and cape as the Roller Derby Kid. 
• Ranko, the homeless vet who lives in the woods behind he convenience store.
• He keeps to himself mostly and is left alone except for that weird kid in the cape who brings him food sometime. 
• Oh, and Dr. Ted Melville. Ranko checks in with him from time to time.  
• Mrs. Wilson, neighborhood watch or just a nosy neighbor?  
• And speaking of nosy, there’s Jack Foster, PI, poking around the neighborhood looking for someone.  

Pelican Road is a seething cauldron of secrets, lies, hormones, frustration, fear, lust, desire and anxiety. 

Then there is the matter of the body.

Lila Nguyen is the one who finds it. It's that private eye who's been nosing around the neighborhood laying flat out on the sidewalk next to his car.  

Lila runs off the find an adult but no one believes her. She's a little girl wearing a mask and a cape and every grown up she tries to tell assumes she's playing some kind of make believe game.  

After 10 minutes of getting no one to listen to her, she goes back to where the body was (hey, that's the title of the book) and it and the PI's car are missing.

Well, what the fuck is going on?  

Palmer also found the body and knows a dead body lying on the street will bring the cops to Pelican Lane and there will be questions and inquiries and someone is going to say, "Maybe that cop who lives in the neighborhood knows something" and then....

Palmer loads the body into the PI's car and drives them far away from Pelican Lane where the cops can find the body there. 

Meanwhile, one of our cast has a plot to kill another person in our little tableau using a 3rd person in our group but then there are complications when Tommy and Karin break into the wrong house and...

There is an explosion of violence and a whole bunch of shit is laid bare.

The book ends with a number of  codas as we move into the future, the survivors of that summer on Pelican Road now older, wiser, sadder reflecting on those events.  

With hindsight, some of them arrive at answers. 

But even after so much time, some questions remain  unresolved.

Like who the hell killed that private investigator anyway? 

Brubaker and Phillips provides an answer in the very last pages of the novel labeled "But wait! Who killed the private eye?"  It was a stupid way to die. 

I have seen some reviewers describe Where the Body Was as a murder mystery and well, it isn't. At least not in the classic sense of a murder mystery.  

The story is about the quiet desperation in which many of us live our lives and the mystery is "How do we cope with that?" 

And what happens when we can't.

Where the Body Was is without a doubt the most ambitious, complex and challenging work to come out the team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips which I was very much engaged in it. I've read it multiple times.

The next Dave-El’s Book Report I promise will be about a book-book. 

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.