Criminal Volume 1:Coward
Written by Ed Brubaker
Illustrated by Sean Phillips
Published by Marvel Comics

Leo has always known when to run. It's what's kept him alive and ironically, kept him prized as one of the best point men in the business. If you're running a heist, you bring Leo aboard because when he runs, you know it's time to follow him But, with an Alzheimer's riddled uncle to deal with, a bad job on the slate and too many angles to consider, will he be able to get out of this one? Criminal is a love letter to film noir and it's a damn good one. Ed Brubaker has been writing stories like this for years but he's never written them better, and with frequent collaborate Sean Phillips onboard the end result is something which looks like the best work of Michael Mann, David Simon and Denis Lehane distilled into comic form.

What stands out here are the characters. Leo, with his scraggy beard, Greta, the girlfriend of a man Leo left behind, the monstrous enforcer Delron, Leo’s dying uncle Ivan and a dozen others all live and frequently die in these pages with stunning vibrancy and energy. None of them feel like stereotypes, none of them feel like heroes and each and every one is fragile and desperate and broken. This is a series where there are no lessons but hard lessons and the end result is a book which balances moments of violence, tenderness and horror perfectly.

There's a real sense of this being part of a wider world (Indeed, the Undertow, the bar that Leo frequents is the common glue between stories) but it never once gets in the way of a story that lives in the gap between black and white, right and wrong Leo is admirable, despicable, tragic and charming depending on who he's with and what he needs and as a result, the other characters and the reader are always kept guessing.

Criminal is an astonishing piece of crime fiction first and a superb comic book second. It drips with atmosphere, snappy dialogue and poignancy and it will not, under any circumstances, let you go once it has you. But you won't want it to. Highly recommended.