Follow Me Down: A Reckless Book

What was Ethan getting up to while his partner/friend Anna was investigating a potentially haunted house and getting stabbed for her troubles?  He was up north in the San Francisco area trying to track down the missing wife of a son of some friendly neighbors who did him a solid once.  While Ethan is no stranger to finding a missing person, you can feel that his hope is that the city’s post-quake recovery is going to be the biggest issue here.  This turns out not to be the case as finding the woman is the easy part of the job.  The hard part comes when he finds out why she left, and whether or not he wants to help her out with what she’s doing.  Because this woman is doing something that puts Ethan back in touch with an old friend:  Rage.

“Follow Me Down” is a particularly apt title for this volume of “Reckless” as its thematic resonance becomes clear the further you get into the story.  It also covers some territory that will be familiar to anyone who’s read “Scene of the Crime,” also by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (who inked over Michael Lark’s pencils).  This isn’t a simple retread, however, as Ethan’s perspective lets us see this material, about the dark side of counterculture, in a new light.  We also get to see the man take matters into his own hands in a way that the series hasn’t quite done before either.

This is all to say that it’s another satisfying installment in the “Reckless” series, which makes me more than a bit disappointed that Brubaker and Phillips are taking some time off to deliver a new original graphic novel.  (I have thoughts on it, but I’ll save them for the Previews Picks.)  Still, the volume leaves off in a way that makes me anxious for the future of Ethan and company.  We got a hint of it last time, and there’s a smaller time jump at the end to bring the story to a proper conclusion.  It leads to a final scene that I honestly can’t tell is meant to be cathartic or outright disturbing.  I like Ethan as a character, but the implication of that final scene, and maybe the volume as a whole, is that he might be finally be losing it after all this time.  Or that love does funny things to people.  That next volume can’t come soon enough…