Two American Kids Doin' the Best They Can-- thoughts on Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Five Gears In Reverse

 Ricky Lawless is his father’s son.  The ghost of old man Teeg Lawless haunts the pages of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Criminal: Five Gears In Reverse, the story of a couple of bad days for Ricky, when he has to fight for more than just his own survival.  In all of the stories about Teeg, you never get the feeling that Teeg has anything to lose, but in this new story, Ricky is fighting to survive, but he’s also fighting for Mallory, maybe the only girl in the world who could truly fall in love with a Lawless.  But can the part of Ricky that’s his father get out of his way enough for Ricky and Mallory to find a future together, or is Ricky just another story about a man who can’t get out of his own way to find a good kind of life?  

Over the course of 20+ years, Brubaker and Phillips have told 12 stories in Criminal, but most of those stories have been about a single family (both a nuclear and extended family) of characters who are just trying to survive, just trying to find something in this world that’s worth holding on to.  That could be Tracy Lawless’ story of a man trying to find his place in this violent world.  It could be Angie, a child of this world, who’s just trying to navigate it. It could be Teeg, Gnarly, or even Chester—the old guard trying to make a living in this world.  Or it could be Ricky, the kid in this book who’s living his life in his father’s long shadow and trying to make his long-dead father proud of him by following in his footsteps.  The multi-generational and non-linear aspects of Criminal add depth to the story that’s being told through these books, painting a picture but working on different areas of the canvas to slowly reveal what the whole picture will be.

Ricky Lawless is reckless, but he has a puppy-dog loyalty to certain people, weirdly including his father, who is the cause of most of Ricky’s damage.  It’s Teeg, it’s Leo (see Criminal: Sinners and Criminal: Cruel Summer for Leo’s story), and it’s Mallory, the woman who may be the love of Ricky’s short and tragic life.  These are the people who mean the most to Ricky, and he carries something of each of them in his adventures here; they’re the voices in his head that lead him and guide him (even if he refuses to listen to Leo’s). These are the people that Ricky’s story keeps coming back to; the father who taught him all the wrong lessons, the best friend who did everything he could to protect Ricky, and the lover who gave Ricky hope that maybe there was something more in this cruel world than he had experienced before.  But with each of them, Ricky can’t help but be self-destructive, showing that the sins of the father remain the biggest force in his life.  Reading this book, you can see that the lessons he learned from his father remain the strongest influence in Ricky’s life. 

But we’ve seen that in last year’s Giant Size Criminal #1, which is actually the first chapter of Five Gears In Reverse (reviewed here), and Brubaker and Phillips continue to explore the broken souls through the rest of the book, giving us just enough echoes of Teeg’s story and actions in Ricky’s that just dig deeper and deeper into Ricky’s trauma.  We know Ricky and Teeg, so we can see those echoes, but Mallory is the wild card here, the lover and partner in crime who brings out the best of the worst in Ricky.  And while Mallory was a player in Tracy’s story Sinners, we don’t know much of her story, where she came from, or what made her just as damaged as Ricky.  

 Mallory is more than just the “girlfriend” in this story. The Bonnie to Ricky’s Clyde, Mallory has a backstory that’s just as bleak and hopeless as Ricky’s, maybe even more so.  Abandoned by her mother and left with her grandparents, there’s nothing for Mallory to do but start breaking the rules from a young age.  Hers is a story of being alone in the world, rebelling and lashing out with no one there to protect or comfort her. She wonders, “... would she have given up the straight world, become who she was… if there had been any kind of love in her life as a kid?”  Say what you want about Teeg Lawless, there are these moments with Ricky where there’s some kind of connection, a night of watching cartoons that’s one of Ricky’s best memories of his dad.  Mallory has nothing like that.  

So does Ricky provide that missing love in Mallory’s life?  Not really, but he does provide something like it, a connection between these two that fills some kind of parent-sized hole in each of their lives.  It’s not just the sins of the parents but the sins of the world that have produced both Ricky and Mallory.  Brubaker and Phillips’ Criminal is a world of hope but not of redemption—Ricky and Mallory can hope for a better future, but they’re not going to get it.  Thanks to the non-linear way that Brubaker and Phillips have told these stories over the years, we know both Ricky and Mallory’s futures, so we can see the two paths that these kids are on.  Eventually, they will both escape this life, but in two very different ways.  That knowledge of their future, as it has been shown in other stories, just adds to the tragedy that hides in the background of this story.  It’s just out of our sight line, but it’s still there, the future waiting for both of these characters.  

Maybe Ricky and Mallory have something true that in each other.  In all of the hurt and pain, all of the struggle just to survive, maybe there’s a glimpse of hope for the future.  Or at least there would be if we didn’t know where the story goes from here.  Five Gears in Reverse is a bleak story—it depicts a self-destructive Ricky pulling Mallory into his self-destructive ways.  It’s not like she was an innocent or anything; she was clearly on some kind of parallel path to Ricky, so when they meet, their mutual brokenness just accelerates because they each now have a true partner in crime.