Jacob’s comic Frank Kafka is being adapted into a TV show - and that experience is always a positive one, right? And then his elderly auntie gets ransomed. Meanwhile, Angie’s dad dies and the mob takes back his bar - she’s out of a home and a job in one fell swoop. What’s a girl to do - and how does her story connect with Jacob’s, and a lunatic called Tracy Lawless?
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, aka the best creative team in comics, are back after a five year hiatus on their signature series Criminal with Book 11: The Knives - and it’s a helluva return to form! (Not that they’ve been lazy - they’ve just been making other comics, like the Reckless books and standalones like Houses of the Unholy and Where the Body Was.)
Part of the genius of Criminal is that each book can be read as its own self-contained story or as part of the ever-expanding series of this richly-detailed world. So don’t be put off by “Book 11” (not that they label the books numerically anyway) - The Knives can be read by someone who hasn’t read the previous 10 and still make perfect sense. You don’t need to read this series in sequence to appreciate any one book.
Although it is great for longtime readers like myself to see old faces returning. In The Knives, Brubaker/Phillips continue the stories of Jacob (the cartoonist from Bad Night, among others), Angie (from Coward), Gnarly Brown (The Dead and The Dying), and Tracy Lawless (from Lawless, among others), with cameos from Hal Crane (Bad Weekend) and Leo (from Coward) as well as the background character, the Undertow bar.
The opening chapter is a fun look at how disappointing a creative process it can be in adapting literary source material into TV in Hollywood. Jacob Kurtz (a nod to Jack Kirby, whose real name was Jacob Kurtzberg) has a miserable time of it and this part has a convincing air of authenticity to it as Brubaker has been working in Hollywood for the last few years himself. Criminal the TV show is due out soon on Amazon Prime with his other books Velvet and Kill or Be Killed currently in development.
We get to see how Gnarly’s story ends and what Angie does next when she needs cash. I won’t go into the various twists of Brubaker’s ingeniously imaginative story entangling so many of his and Phillips’ old characters but the myriad strands are never boring and I read nearly the entire book in one sitting (my eyes gave out eventually and I had to sleep but finished it off it in the morning).
The Knives is both a love letter to comics and old movies while also containing that dark edge that’s always there in all of the Criminal books. I noticed Jacob Phillips’ colouring more in this book particularly as they were so effective here. Optimistically brighter colours for the Hollywood sequence, dark blues and neon pinks for the backgrounds of Angie’s increasingly desperate story, sepia tones for flashbacks - it all adds to the atmosphere and aids the storytelling brilliantly. And there’s nothing more I can say about his dad Sean that I haven’t said before - he’s a master and his art is as dependably good here as it’s always been throughout the series.
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are back with the cracking The Knives. The best in the business showing everyone again how it’s done with effortless style and panache. Thoroughly entertaining and engaging storytelling, The Knives is a great Criminal book that also celebrates the series as a whole, while also being a brilliant standalone crime comic - probably (it’s still August) the best comic of 2025.
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