Criminal: A Wolf Among Wolves

The latest installment of my favorite comic, Ed Brubaker's Criminal, hits shops today. Sitting on the fence about it, for some bizarre reason? Check out the 10-page preview Ed shared over at Warren Ellis's Whitechapel site. (Scroll down a bit for those pages.) Then stick around as Ed does the Q&A thing, and discusses his influences, crime novels, and the horrors of a low-salt diet.

Two Reasons to Hit a Comic Shop Today

1. Chances are, your local comic shop is giving away a sweet little bit of Marvel swag: an April calendar featuring the big "Secret Invasion" event. But on the back (or the front, depending on how it's folded) is a March calendar featuring Cable. I grabbed a bunch yesterday, and forced my kids to hang one in their room. Hey, promotion knows no bounds. And if the big mutant with the glowing eye gives them nightmares... well, that's just part of the joy of childhood. (Remind to tell you sometime about the evil clown my father painted on my bedroom wall... one with real seatbelts for arms, that came out of the freakin' wall...)

2. Ed Brubaker's Criminal Vol. 2 #1 hit the racks yesterday. If you're a fan of Hard Case Crime and Gold Medal paperbacks and Cain and Thompson and Goodis and the gang, you can't afford to miss this hardboiled pulp noir comic. And if you're a newbie, this issue is the perfect place to dive in: "Second Chance in Hell" is a self-contained story, packed with more pages than the usual Criminal installment. I'm also proud to report that my short essay about David Goodis, "Knock Me Over," is included in the back, along with an amazing Sean Phillips illustration. This essay won't appear anywhere else, and the extras aren't reprinted in the trades.

So to recap: walk into a comic shop with $3.50, and walk out with a cool poster, a killer noir story, and a little noir essay by your friendly neighborhood Pole. Tell me a better deal than that and I'll buy you a hot dog.

Superbadassery

Bill Hader, interviewing Ed Brubaker. What could go wrong?

Coolest revelation: Simon Pegg (who we all know is actually Allan Guthrie) turned Hader on to Criminal. Boy, what a small, small world.

Your Monday Moment of Noir

He'd only been back for two weeks, but he already felt the familiarity seeping back into his bones. The memories of the back alleys and train tracks running like a vein through his mind. This was a hard place, a cold place. It felt like home. When he was in lock-up he'd read Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. But Tracy thought the truth was you could never really leave it...

Criminal #6
by Ed Brubaker
(Icon, Marvel 2007)

Criminal Minds

If you're still kicking yourself because you missed the single issues of the first arc of Ed Brubaker's Criminal ("Coward"), quit your whining and get to your nearest comic shop. The second story arc is currently underway, and "Lawless, Part Two" (issue #7) is in stores now.

Why, you ask, should you pick up single issues when you know there will be a trade collection at some point? Because the single issues feature cool-as-shit DVD-style extras. (This month, it's an essay on Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye by Steven Grant.) And in this issue, Brubaker does me the solid of mentioning The Wheelman, The Blonde and This Here's A Stick-Up in his back-of-the-book letter. So do him a solid and pick up multiple issues. Your friends will only try to permanently "borrow" them anyway.