Threat Quality Press

Here’s the deal: I know comic books. I know them very, very well. And I know some of you like them. And some of you think you might, if only you had someone to guide you to the good stuff. So I’m going to look at some recent reads and some Important Works, and see if I can’t recommend something to you.

Over the weekend, I was reading some books by writer Ed Brubaker, and I started to wonder: What separates a good writer from a great writer? Where’s the line?

After a shaky early start on whiny-ass autobiographical comics, he cut his teeth as a solid crime fiction writer, then moved on to Sleeper, a wonderful and also spectacularly bleak espionage story.

Believe it or not, you actually know who Brubaker is: Remember a couple summers back, when everyone was crying because Captain America got killed?

That was Ed Brubaker. His run on Captain America has been astonishingly good, full of genuine surprises (the assassination of longtime villain the Red Skull in the first issue), exciting twists (the reveal that Cap’s former partner is alive and acting as an enemy operative), romantic pathos (the tentative rekindling of the relationship between Cap and his government handler, Sharon Carter), and crazy-ass super-hero wildness (robots wrecking up London!).

Oh yeah, and he killed the lead character of the book – an American icon – and never once did it feel like a stunt. The care Brubaker has put into crafting a tightly plotted, exciting narrative (helped enormously by the well-rendered, grounded art of Steve Epting and others) means he’s earned a lot of trust from the audience. And so far he’s delivered.

But then there are his other books. Take Daredevil. After a year playing with the wreckage of the status quo left behind by Brian Bendis, he pretty much reset the book. I realized when I was three paperbacks behind his current run that he’d effectively “ended” Bendis’s story, without leaving me any reason to continue to whatever the next stage was.

It’s good. But it’s not required. And that’s par for the course with Brubaker – a solid writer who, Captain America aside, can’t seem to make his books ring with the feeling of required reading. His runs on Batman and X-Men were bland and impersonal. His post-apocalypse-teenagers book Deadenders felt like it was trying way too hard to be hip.

This weekend, I sat with two newer Brubaker books – one competent but not what it should’ve been, and one damn near perfect if not for one glaring problem – and wondered: Considering he’s writing a fantastic run on one of my favorite characters…Why don’t I like Ed Brubaker more?

In Immortal Iron Fist, Brubaker and co-writer Matt Fraction attempt to boost the 70′s B-lister into a modern kung fu action story…by having the lead character narrate the story to his dead father, and learn he’s actually part of a long line of warriors claiming the “Iron Fist” title.

Despite some kinetic art by David Aja, Brubaker takes the exact wrong tack – trying to craft a legacy around the guy to increase the sense of importance. But here’s a little secret. The most prominent display of hero-narrating-to-dead-parent story is Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, and it’s used not as a device to show the character thinks about what his parents would’ve wanted – it’s to show us Bruce Wayne is dangerously obsessive. But Iron Fist isn’t dangerously obsessive – ignoring his physical talents, he’s actually a bit of a goofball, not that bright and not that curious.

Iron Fist should be like the Scott Pilgrim series – insanely fast-paced, madcap adventure. But instead this kung-fu hero of an ancient mystical city is skulking around NYC rooftops chasing down one of Marvel’s old-school quasi-terrorist groups.

And then there’s Criminal. Which is soooo close to being perfect. “Coward,” the first Criminal collection, is more in Brubaker’s wheelhouse – he knows how to construct a crime story. What at first seems like a been-done caper story turns into something more personal and tragic – in fact, it’s easily one of the best crime movies never made.

But then there’s that fucking voiceover again. It gives us a bunch of hardboiled observations and cynicism and paranoia, but none of it improves on the story. None of it means anything – if you were to remove the narration, it would not affect the story whatsoever. In fact, since he’s re-teamed with his highly capable Sleeper artist Sean Phillips, it probably would’ve been better, letting silent art tell the story at its own pace.

And there it was: the reason Ed Brubaker hasn’t hit that Area of Greatness. He knows the craft – well enough to construct a nine-panel page that doesn’t feel cluttered, or plot an exciting narrative that doesn’t bog down over time – but he keeps falling back on outmoded ideas of edginess: superheroes with daddy issues, or crime thrillers needlessly told through craggy first-person narration.

Ed Brubaker is a Solid Writer. Not that that’s a bad place to be. But I know he can be just a little bit better – maybe even that nebulous level of Great – if he lets go of a couple of old conventions.

By the grades (more or less chronologically):

Scene of the Crime: B
Sleeper: A
Batman: C-
Captain America: A
Uncanny X-Men: C-
Daredevil: B-
Iron Fist: C+
Criminal: A- 

Coming up: Discussing the Big Three of Important Books – Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, and Maus – and wondering…have there been any Important Books since the mid-80′s?

This entry was posted on February 3, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under comic books, Jeff Holland with tags Brubaker, comics, Jeff Holland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.