Giant Size Criminal #1: Perfect Crime Fiction

Crime fiction is often centered around detectives or other investigators trying to solve a mystery or catch a criminal. The classic crime fiction subgenre that tells the story from the criminal’s point of view is the caper, which often contains elements of humor, audacity, and unusual cleverness. In the assorted Criminal series. Brubaker and Phillips successfully blended mostly straight-played crime stories with caper elements, delivering engaging narratives, compelling characters, and a little humor. Giant Size Criminal #1 looks to hit all of these targets again.

Giant Size Criminal #1 features Ricky Lawless, an established character from previous Criminal series. Brubaker plays the character straight for the issue’s opening pages. His internal monologue reads like it’s straight out of typical hardboiled fiction. Ricky has to sneak into a hotel room and rob a poker player after he leaves the tables. As the issue goes on and Ricky waits, Brubaker finds ways to inject humor. It starts off uncomplicated and enjoyable. Eventually Brubaker adds character exploration to this humor, making that exploration an unintended consequence of Ricky’s behavior. Moral ambiguity, a typical aspect of hardboiled fiction protagonists, isn’t present here, but in fleshing out Ricky’s character, Brubaker creates someone who is just as complicated.

The overall story in Giant Size Criminal #1 is easy to follow and self-contained. Though Ricky is a previously established character, no prior knowledge about him is required here. Ricky has an effective single issue story arc here. Indeed, rather than require prior reading to engage with the character, his presence here is so compelling that it will likely make new readers interested in his previous appearances.

Most of Giant Size Criminal #1 takes place in a dark hotel room. Jacob Phillips does a good job darkening everything, successfully throwing the setting into shadow. Outside the hotel room, visible through a wall length window, the night sky is twilight shades of blue and purple. This contrasts with shades of pink and yellow closer to the ground in the surrounding buildings. Phillips balances the overall darkness of the hotel room with the twilight coloring streaming in through the window. The result is a break from a largely static dark setting in the hotel room with hints of relative brightness here and there.

A dark setting means Sean Phillips is using a lot of heavy shading throughout most of Giant Size Criminal #1. This primarily affects the depiction of Ricky. Patches of full black shading cover parts of Ricky’s face almost constantly–sometimes as much as half of his face is obscured. As a result, Phillips often has only a portion of Ricky’s face to work with to convey clear and obvious emotion. Most of Ricky’s expressions are conveyed through his eyes–shape, angle they’re looking in, and so forth. Even with only one visible, and a bit of detail on the forehead or around the mouth, Phillips is able to convey what Ricky is thinking.

This ability to so effectively depict Ricky is part and parcel of the issue as a whole. Giant Size Criminal #1 isn’t lacking for text. But a lot of what Brubaker writes connects with more abstract ideas in Ricky’s head as opposed to physical actions or precise “what I’m doing now is” type thoughts. A lot of the storytelling runs–very successfully–through Phillips’ art.