Reckless

First of an ongoing Graphic Novel series.

Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Philips
Colors by Jacob Philips

Published by Image Comics.

Buy it HERE.

Familiar ground.

I've read a few books by this team such as The Fade Out and Scene of the Crime. With them you know you're going to get a well-structured comic book experience. The panels will be laid out with an easy, effortless aesthetic. The dialog will match up with the action. The pacing will flow with its moments of action and quiet interludes...

... which is why I felt a little disappointed in this story. The structure was good, even great at times.

Reckless is the story -soon to be recurring ones- of a detective who works out of an old abandoned movie theater in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. His name is Ethan Reckless. He has a punk-girl sidekick named Anna. This comic series opens with Ethan tracking down some missing money from an ex-girlfriend (Rainy) from the late 1960s. Apparently somebody made a promise to her to share in some ill-begotten loot from a bank heist those many years ago and now she can't find him. So far so good. The story starts kicking in and I'm sold. But then...

It's a comic book made with clip art.

What Reckless lacked was a hand-crafted sentiment. All the pages looked breezy, 'illustration-y' which is what they would say when I was in Art School. What that means is that the art while proficient tends to have a detached 'clip-art' feel to it. It's hard to gain a sense of individuality and their attendant personalities.

Buy it anyway, my opinion be damned.

My verdict on this comic is that you should definitely check it out in spite of my 'nits' about the artwork. I think it's all the 'independent' and 'crowd-funded' books that I've been reading that's colored my perception of what makes a great read. I was expecting a little more blood sweat and tears from the visuals department, and what I got was a somewhat breezy and sketched-in smoothness that was hard to get a grip onto.

Next Tuesday:

Speaking of 'Independent and Crowd-funded'...

Guerrilla Publishing has a horror anthology:

Tales from the Cryptic Closet

with no fewer than 15 contributors! This should be fun!!

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