This Is What Graphic Storytelling Should Be

Scene of the Crime Deluxe Edition hardcover
Image Comics
Ed Brubaker, writer
Michael Lark and Sean Phillips, artists

You'll care about these characters -- they're that well written -- but don't get too attached because many of them won't make it through the stories alive.

I like a lot of what Ed Brubaker produces. He tends to bring out the best in the superheroes he writes, but he truly shines writing everyday people. One of the first series where I really took notice of his work in particular was DC Comics' Gotham Central. That series, with just a very few cameo exceptions, left out the superheroes in favor of focusing on the detectives in Batman's hometown, and Brubaker and co-writer Greg Rucka wrote those folks well.

From there, I signed on for Brubaker's Criminal run with Sean Phillips at Marvel Icon. Here the focus was on criminals, but in a world without superpowers. These are everyday lowlifes -- bank robbers, con artists and ne'er-do-wells. In this series, I found myself feeling sympathy for, and even cheering on, many of the hard-luck cases who filled the pages of Criminal.

All of that is what led me to this Scene of the Crime hardcover. The miniseries by this name is not Ed Brubaker's first comics work, but it is his first work for DC Comics, originally under the Vertigo imprint. The main mystery presented here, "A Little Piece of Goodnight," was intended to be the second case in an ongoing comic series, Brubaker explains in the text piece at the end of the volume. Instead, the editors chose to lead with this tale, and before it was concluded, the ongoing became a series of minis, then just the one story.

The only exception was a short story titled "God and Sinners: A Scene of the Crime Christmas Mystery" which was written for a Vertigo anthology book that printed a few months before Scene of the Crime No. 1 debuted. It is the only other story published to date featuring the main characters in the Scene of the Crime universe -- young private detective Jack Herriman; his uncle, Knut Herriman, a semi-retired, semi-famous crime-scene photographer; and Knut's girlfriend, Molly -- and it is also included in this volume.

The fact that these two stories are the only Scene of the Crime tales to see print so far is one of the many crimes detailed in this book. Jack not only gets to the bottom of the main mystery in "Goodnight," but readers are also treated to much of Jack's own back story and motivations, something Brubaker says he planned to reveal over the course of the ongoing series, little tidbits at a time. It is good that he knew the series wasn't going to be able to continue and could rework all of Jack's story into this single tale. Jack's personal story is every bit as interesting as the missing person case he is hired to solve and the larger plot his investigations uncover along the way.

Once again, Brubaker has crafted an incredible narrative that leaves me wanting more of the same. There is little one can say about a book to more highly recommend it than that. And this tale is also beautifully, grittily illustrated by Lark and Phillips, two frequent collaborators of Brubaker's.