Night Fever Review (Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips)

Jonathan Webb is an American publisher on a business trip to Italy in the summer of 1978. But he finds he can’t sleep when he arrives and, on a whim one night, follows a costumed couple to a subterranean Eyes Wide Shut-type party, and there meets the mysterious Rainer. Now with Rainer in his life, Webb’s mundane world is going to get a whole lot stranger…

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (finally!) take a break from their Reckless series to produce this standalone book, Night Fever. The story has some interesting elements to it but a lot of the action feels forced and silly, sitting awkwardly alongside the other material, so that it comes off as a cheesy crime comic instead of something more original.

The source of my problems with the story is the character of Rainer. He’s charismatic and enigmatic who happens to take a liking to dreary old Webb and drag him along on his James Bond-ish adventures. The reveal of why this is at the end does make sense, I just don’t think the story needed a lot of cliched spy action and I would’ve preferred that character excised entirely. It’s all action stuff Brubaker’s done better elsewhere in numerous other books and here feels both pointless and underwhelming.

The real story is about a middle-aged man who thinks he’s wasted his life and perhaps, perhaps not, takes out his frustrations on a person who he thinks is living the life he wanted to live. That person is novelist Denn Pickett whose new book, And Then the Fire, is not only likely to be a bestseller, but also, inexplicably, features a weird dream Webb used to have over and over, which only makes Webb even more fixated on him.

Throw in the unusual goings-on at night - particularly at that countryside mansion towards the end - his insomnia, his increasing detachment from reality, and the twist at the end when he decides to re-read his dream in Pickett’s novel again, and you’ve got plenty of much more intriguing material to explore without resorting to hokey action, which is unfortunately what Brubaker chooses to focus on instead. I suppose Rainer is the key to Webb getting into the mansion but Webb didn’t need Rainer to get into that initial party so I’m sure Brubaker could’ve figured out a way to get Webb in without him.

Sean Phillips’ art is as good as it always is. Whether it’s action or the gorgeous Italian architecture, it always looks first class. Some of the pages’ backgrounds are coloured yellow instead of the usual white, and I wonder why they did that. Yellow generally symbolises happiness in fiction and the pages that were yellow had scenes where Webb seemed to be happy - probably that’s why, but it still seems odd to point this out like that.

Night Fever feels like a wasted opportunity. Like Brubaker could’ve told a better story about disillusioned lives and instead fell back on familiar ground to tell a half-baked crime story that doesn’t seem to be about anything and is full of unsatisfying dead-ends and cliches. A disappointing effort from a usually strong creative team.