Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillip explore the tragedy of living under the sins of our fathers.
Giant Size Criminal #1 by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Jacob Phillips (Image Comics, 2025)
So Criminal #1 (or Giant Size Criminal #1 as I guess it’s officially titled even if the cover leaves off “Giant Size”) exists because it wants you to know that there’s an Amazon series based on it coming out soon. “Coming soon to a streaming platform near you!!” the back cover declares in a very non-descriptive way. Looking through the book there are a lot of references to the upcoming television show but I don’t know if it ever identifies which streaming service, which seems odd. It’s almost as if Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are ashamed to be taking Amazon’s money, as if that’s any better or worse than Apple or Netflix. Actually, it’s Jeff Bezos’ money so it’s certainly worse. But let’s take out the whole “selling out to the man” element here and just focus on the real work of these two creators— the comic book.
Over the past 20 years, we’ve witnessed the tragedy of Ricky Lawless, his father Teeg, and his older brother Tracy. The story of these three men forms the backbone of the Criminal story. At least two of these men would have wanted Bezos’ money, thinking it would have made their lives better. Maybe Tracy was the smart one or the moral one or just smart enough to realize that nothing he could do would make him worthy of a good life. Criminal #1 is Ricky’s story but it’s important to ground him in relationship to his family as he takes on a job to rob a three-time world poker champ to pay off his own debts. It’s supposed to be easy money— all Ricky has to do is wait in a luxury hotel room for the poker champ to show up and then he can pull off the job.
“High Roller” is maybe the story that most clearly shows us just who Ricky Lawless is. He’s been the focus of other stories like Cruel Summer before but that story shows a teen Ricky reacting to his father’s world. “High Roller” shows Ricky at his prime, a man doing a job to get out of some other trouble. And that’s really the Lawless modus operandi— anything they’re doing is reacting to the world around them rather than them taking charge of their situation. Brubaker and Phillips use this story to show us how Ricky is his father’s son. There’s one nice and touching flashback to Ricky’s best memory of his father and then reality set in for Ricky as everything on this easy job falls apart.
In this short story, Brubaker shows us the best and worst of Ricky Lawless. More than any other character in this series (Angie in My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies and The Knives being the exception here,) Ricky is the child of this world without law. And it’s not just a legal law but a moral law— where does right and wrong come in when trying to get through the day is all about survival? And this story is just about trying to get through one day, trying to survive the night to take on the world again tomorrow. That’s what Ricky’s life is and this story boils that struggle down into less than 40 pages. It’s the tragedy of Ricky Lawless writ large in a short story.
When you have Sean Phillips on the art and Jacob Phillips coloring the comic, you can tell that kind of epic story by just showing a guy sitting around a plush casino hotel room, listening to an Agatha Christie mystery on his iPod, and getting high on a much stronger drug than he thought he was getting high on. This story doesn’t go to the emotional and fraught heights of other Criminal stories but it gets right to the heart of it because Sean Phillips' artistic storytelling is about the characters far more than it is about the action (and he’s a great action artist.) In the art, we empathize with this kid who doesn’t have anything more than the job in front of him. This is the only thing that Ricky knows; it’s his life and in that way, it’s no different from yours or mine.
This story is just a day and a night in the life of Ricky Lawless. In itself, it’s not some epic exploration of who he is and why he does the things that he does. And yet Brubaker and Phillips get all of that in there. This may be the purest story we’ve gotten about Ricky (and that’s a weird thing to call it— “pure”.) “High Rollers” shows him at his most natural and most vulnerable that way. It’s relatively low stakes so it shows us this kid who grew up not knowing the possibilities that there are other types of a life to live other than the one he knows.
There is this purity to Ricky’s story that’s contained in this package that’s kind of aimed at people who may want to check out Criminal before the television show on a nameless streaming service begins. By telling Ricky’s story this way, are Brubaker and Phillips trying to hold onto the purity of their little comic book? There’s a chance that Criminal could blow up and become something much bigger than it is now. It’s equally possible that it will just get lost amid so much other steaming flotsam and jetsam. It’s been 20 years since the first Criminal story “Coward” but Giant Size Criminal #1 shows us that there’s still a lot of life and mystery to tell the story of in these comic books.
Comments ()