Criminal vol. 6: The Last of the Innocent

Savor this one people, because it’s the last you’ll see of this series for a good year or more.  Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have been the most consistently excellent writer/artist team since the heyday of Ennis/Dillon, and I think it’s fantastic that they’ve continued to explore new territory in the crime/noir genres over the years.  They’ll be continuing that trend next month when their maxi-series “Fatale” starts and runs through the end of the year.  While I think the idea of “‘Criminal’ via ‘H.P. Lovecraft’” sounds awesome, I’m still bothered by the fact that it means we won’t be getting new installments of this or “Incognito” — which ended on a big “What’s going to happen next!?” note — anytime soon.

As I continue to come to grips with the fact that you can’t have everything, let me say that this volume is as good as anything the series has offered.  It’s also unique in the sense that I can’t talk about what makes it so without offering a *SPOILER WARNING* first.

Just about everything good in Riley Richards’ life comes courtesy of his wife Felix.  The job.  The money.  The place in high society, you name it.  Problem is that his job sucks, his father-in-law hates him, he owes a lot of money to the local mob, and his wife is sleeping with his worst enemy from high school.  Then he gets a chance to get away from it all after his dad falls ill and he goes back to his hometown of Brookview and winds up re-connecting with his other high school sweetheart, Lizzie, and best bud/best stoner Freakout while reminiscing about all the good old days of his childhood.  So many good memories compared to what he has now, and then Riley realizes what he has to do in order to get it all back.  He just needs to kill his wife.

What follows is another intricately constructed tale of murder, deceit, betrayal, and all the nastiest bits of human nature.  However, it’s also a showcase for the considerable artistic talents of Sean Phillips.  I don’t think there’s any genre that the man is ill-suited for, and that now includes “Archie”-style teenage romance.  In a neat visual motif, Riley’s high-school memories are rendered in that style with the primary cast fitting neatly into the archetypes from that series.  The characters’ actions in these sequences also ensure that Brubaker and Phillips will never, EVER get to write any “Archie” comics either.  These sequences are mainly played for laughs, but that also has the effect of showing the reader how appealing they were and why Riley wants to go back to them.  Then at the end, we find out that things weren’t as rose-colored as initially thought, just as Riley has to put the finishing touches on his plan.

And the best (spoileriffic) part?  He gets away with it.  Unlike every previous volume where even the slightest taste of victory on the part of the protagonist is tainted by what they lost or where they wind up, Riley gets what he thinks he really wants.  Yes, he’s a killer and a duplicitous bastard, but intentionally or not, things are set up so that even if you’re not rooting for him to succeed, you don’t feel too badly about who gets hurt along the way.  I mean, his wife’s cheating on him with his rival, her father’s a class-conscious asshat, and Freakout… well, okay, I was sad about what happened to him.  Still, for the majority of the story, the people being screwed over more or less have it coming to them.

That said, though the ending implies that this is a fresh start for Riley, part of me wonders if Brubaker won’t come back later on to see how he’s holding up.  There is the matter of Mr. Black, the P.I. who loves to catch people in lies, and the fact that for a story about the destructive power of nostalgia, the protagonist ends up in a pretty good place.  I can almost see the next series picking up with Riley’s new life starting to sour and the man plotting a new crime to try and turn back the clock again.  That’s the obvious route, of course, and Brubaker and Phillips have made great stories by avoiding the obvious.  So if we never find out what happens to Riley, I’m cool with that.  If I have to wait until 2013 to find out what happens next, I’m sure I’ll be cool with it when it arrives.