Reckless Review (Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips)

Ethan Reckless: former undercover FBI operative once posing as a ‘60s radical is now banished from the agency and, in 1981 Los Angeles when we catch up with him, he’s a surfer dude who owns a dilapidated movie house downtown. He’s also a secret gun-for-hire. And then an old flame tracks him down with a mission to kill for a fortune - but who’s playing who and what’s Ethan getting himself into?

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ latest is one helluva barnstormer of a comic! From the cracking opener to the multi-layered, tense narrative that slowly unfolds, I was gripped all the way through.

Like in Criminal with their series regular Tracy Lawless, this book features another tough bastard with an unlikely name: Ethan Reckless. Over the many years he’s been writing these kinds of stories, Brubaker’s perfected the hard-boiled, noirish voice that he uses for Ethan and the words flow easily - it’s an effortlessly compelling read. Meanwhile, the plot twists and turns in unexpected directions, the action scenes are well-spaced apart to keep up the excitement, and you learn bits and pieces of Ethan’s past as you go along, rather than in one heavy info-dump, so there’s never a dull moment - the pacing is masterful.

Brubaker’s not doing anything here that we haven’t seen him do before - tailing crooks, tracking down leads, gunfights, bombs, fist-fighting nekkid (ok, maybe that last one’s new!) - but he’s doing it so damn well in this book that I didn’t mind at all. Ethan’s a fascinating character with a storied past, the supporting cast are fine for the roles they’re cast in - Rainy as the femme fatale, Wilder as the villain, Anna as the fixer - and I loved the set pieces (the daring raid on the airfield in particular is amazing) and the conclusion was fantastic. Top it off with Sean Phillips’ usual first-rate artwork and what’s not to love?

At least one good thing came out of the pandy this year: Reckless. Because, as Brubaker mentions in his afterword, the pandy put the brakes on his and Sean’s monthlies and allowed him the time to consider what they were doing. He always wanted to do the comics equivalent of paperback pulp novels, similar to Darwyn Cooke’s Richard Stark’s Parker adaptations, and now he had the time to do it.

So Reckless is the first of at least three books in a series to come out over the next year. The second Reckless book, Friend of the Devil, is due in April and the third, untitled, probably this time next year. And, if the next two are even half as good as this first one was, I can’t wait! There’s still a few weeks to go before the monumental year that was 2020 slithers away but I don’t expect to come across another comic as good as this so I’m calling it now - Reckless is my pick for comic of the year!