A Shot in the Dark in Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips' Brutal Dark #3
Ezra Cain could have been Indiana Jones but he became Phillip Marlowe instead.
As Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery #3 opens, Ezra Cain is working two cases that may be the same case. A museum has hired him to track down a missing artifact while a German woman has pleaded with him to find her missing husband, a night watchman at that very same museum. The cases converge this issue as Cain wakes up handcuffed in a dark building, basically told by the owner of the building, Hans Huber, that there’s nothing to see here so leave or face the consequences. It’s definitely more of a threat than simply a warning. And just to drive the point home, Karl Meyer— the missing husband— is pushed into the room, weakly trying to convince Cain that he’s where he wants to be. Writer Chris Condon and artist Jacob Phillips know all of the old noir stories and movies; they know how and why they work. So when they employ all of those noir elements here, they’re weaving them together into a story about those elements and those types of stories. This is a story that’s practically begging to be a 1940’s black-and-white movie. So why does it feel like that’s only scratching the surface of what they could be trying to do here?
Ezra Cain is a classic character type—a former cop turned gumshoe detective. Previous issues of this series have hinted at his past; before he became a cop, he was a promising archeology student. But World War I derailed that future and set him on his current path. He could have been Indiana Jones but he became Phillip Marlowe instead. So when he finally leaves that darkened building with more questions than answers, a buddy of his well-meaningly pulls him into a cop bar to hang out with his old cop buddies. With the questions about Huber and Meyer still fresh on his mind, he’s not eager to be pulled back into his own past, reliving memories from a lifetime ago. Key to those memories that confront him in the bar are an old flame, a reporter in a red dress, and the cigar-chomping commissioner he butted heads with and who kicked Cain off the force. Condon and Phillips accept these noirish elements and turn right into them; these are the stories they’re telling so these are the narrative signifiers that they need to include in this story.
But there are these small, little things that Condon and Phillips are seeding throughout this story. The first issue opened up with the discovery of ancient automatons protecting the Anvil of Hephaestus (the museum’s missing artifact.) In this latest issue, Huber tries to explain that a man Cain saw with “mechanical legs” outside of the building was just a WWI vet with new legs to replace the ones that the man lost in the war. This introduces something else into this noir story— a tinge of science fiction and/or fantasy. This injection of something else is also seen in Cain’s unconscious visions (usually while asleep or knocked out) and memories where enemy soldiers are ghoulish zombies haunting him. These narrative suggestions fit within the noir framework so far because they’re not the story— they’re just elements of it.
But while there’s the surface level— all that noir and other stuff— it’s difficult to glimpse what’s really happening here. What is Ezra Cain’s story? What is he going through on a deep and personal level? So much of this issue feels like Condon and Phillips are still setting the scene, introducing us to the cast that they’ve (at best) glossed over what the stakes are for Cain. What it means for him to succeed or fail is nowhere to be seen. While it’s a fun little puzzle that they’re setting up— these intertwined mysteries, these characters have yet to find any agency beyond serving that mystery. If there’s something that’s being said here, some point that’s being made through this story, it’s hard to unearth it underneath all of the noir trappings that the creators are playing with.
Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery #3 is a brew of different story elements. Starting with the heavy noir base, Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips are enhancing their story with these different flavors which complement but give a bit of a counter feel to everything else that’s happening in Cain’s life. As a noir story, this issue is a bit of comfort food, giving us what we want and expect without offering anything of true substance. Condon and Phillips are dancing around something here. There’s the mystery but there also has to be something behind it, some insight or commentary that we’ve barely seen yet.
