Gorgeous noir/pulp. ( )

Brubaker and Phillips really hit their stride in this volume of Criminal. While this writer/artist team always excel at crime noir, they're absolutely outstanding when they add a psychological or supernatural twist. In this case, we have a cartoonist who occasionally converses with his Dick Tracy detective, Frank Kafka. It adds a bit of lunacy to an already strong story.

Can't wait to read the next volume! ( )

This book is the one that notches the whole series up from incredibly good to great. In every volume of Criminal, part of the pleasure is how characters from the background of one story appear in the foreground of the next -- and vice versa. Here the character is none other than the artist of a comic strip that appeared early on in the series. That Brubaker trusts we'd remember is one thing, and that the character turns out to be so complicated in his status as former criminal suspect is something else. But what really knocks this one out of the park is how Brubaker's Criminal partner, the artist Sean Philips, blends the comic strip with the story as it proceeds. Hallucinatory.