Broken Frontier

Earlier this year, I was one of those readers not hip enough to jump on SLEEPER from the jump, but lucky enough to score all twelve issues of SEASON ONE from my local comics shop. GOTHAM CENTRAL, the best police procedural not on television came next, then CATWOMAN after that. A couple of issues of SLEEPER: SEASON TWO sealed it: this year, Ed Brubaker was the best writer in comics.
He’s been so good that he may actually have a shot at reviving the moribund Authority, and breathing new life into Captain America.

In a glutted market, not many comics live up to the hyper-hype generated by the monthly flood of #1's, and more relaunches, reloads,and rehashes than you can shake a stick at. Brubaker’s are definitely among those that deliver what they promise, primarily because his writer’s toolbox is full of the refined skills that hacks would kill for. Deft pacing. Tight dialogue. Narrative drive. And a novelist's sense of how to modulate intensity in a way that generates real suspense.

But perhaps his greatest strength is characterization. Take CATWOMAN, for example. Not only has Brubaker reinvented the character for the ambiguous, shades-of-gray times we live in, but (after what, 40+ years?) he’s also rendered Selina Kyle herself as a real person. By comparison, Halle Berry's Catwoman was a joke and no where near as sexy as the one I’ve paid $2.50 every month to read about. In addition to Selina, SLEEPER’s Holden, Miss Misery, and Tao are among the most compelling characters in comics today. Each one of them, in their own individual ways, are very subtle deconstructions of well-worn archetypes.

Then there’s Brubaker’s expert use of first-person narration. A number of writers use the first-person as a cheap way to pass telling off as showing, or as a short-cut towards characterization when action or dialogue would be more dramatic. Brubaker’s is integral to the narrative itself, in Holden’s case an exploration of the psychological effects of not feeling physical pain more developed, and, at times, more gut-wrenching, than any I've read. In his hands, first-person allows the reader to experience the world as Holden does, in all its shady gray. The effect is that the reader knows Holden, but also has no idea what he's truly capable of.

Like his GOTHAM CENTRAL collaborator Greg Rucka, Brubaker would be a natural as a novelist. However, without a 300-page thriller with his name on it, I look forward to his work on several great comics from month to month. Not so much for what will happen next, but for how it will happen, as the sheer joy of watching a real writer ply his craft is itself worth the cover price.

- Dexter K. Flowers