At this point, when it comes to crime comics, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s comics have eclipsed David Lapham’s (Stray Bullets). If you talk about the genre, you irremediably think about Criminal, then comes other favorites like The Fade Out, Kill or be Killed, Fatale…
With the award-winning Pulp, the duo confirmed that they don’t even need to connect their work to Criminal anymore—like with My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies—or to another series to find their audiences in a different format. They became the brand. Everything they try is basically a winner.
Reckless doesn’t contradict that. It is a new crime series, for sure, but the creative team decided to try a different publication approach. Each story is self-contained and collected in one 144-page hardcover graphic novel.
It’s like reading a good old pulp novel, but with Brubaker’s writing, Sean Phillips’s pencils, and Jacob Phillips’s colors, the result could almost qualify as a reinvention of the genre by the form—published by Image Comics.
But what is Reckless about? Well, it is about crimes—the sex, drugs, and murder kind—, but with a hero at the center of the story, or heroes even (if we count Anna, and we count her).
Ethan Reckless is a former sixties radical/undercover FBI agent turned fixer—or troublemaker, it depends on the point of view. He is not a licensed PI. He is just the guy you go to for help with your problems and if he is in the mood, he takes the case. The rest of the time, he is on the beach, surfing, or at the El Ricardo, an old abandoned movie theater, with Anna, his pink-haired assistant—and his only real friend.
Ethan is working when he needs to, but also when he gives a damn—not so often. He can be violent if necessary. Sadly for him, violence often finds him. It comes with the problems he usually tries to fix.
Each book in the Reckless series is set during a specific period, from the wild days of the “70s to the murderous end of the 1980s in Los Angeles. Each story is self-contained, and you don’t have to read them in chronological order. In fact, Ed Brubaker drops hints about the characters” lives that can be explored in later books (or it was in a previous one), but it is not required to read all of the books, you can just pick one at random—and read the other after.
Launched at the end of 2020, Reckless already count five books, and there are more to come in the near future.
Reckless Reading Order
These are all hardcover graphic novels.
- Reckless
- Meet Ethan Reckless: Your trouble is his business, for the right price. But when a fugitive from his radical student days reaches out for help, Ethan must face the only thing he fears … his own past.
- Friend of the Devil: A Reckless Book
- It’s 1985, and things in Ethan’s life are going pretty well … until a missing woman shows up in the background of an old B-movie, and Ethan is drawn into Hollywood’s secret occult underbelly as he hunts for her among the wreckage of the wild days of the ’70s.
- Destroy All Monsters: A Reckless Book
- It’s 1988, and Ethan has been hired for his strangest case yet: finding the secrets of a Los Angeles real estate mogul. How hard could that be, right? But what starts as a deep dive into the life of a stranger will soon take a deadly turn, and Ethan will risk everything that still matters to him.
- The Ghost in You: A Reckless Book—An Anna story.
- It’s the winter of 1989 and Ethan is out of town, so this time, Anna has to tackle the job on her own. When a movie scream queen asks her to prove the mansion she’s renovating isn’t haunted, Anna will stumble into the decades-long mystery of one of Hollywood’s most infamous murder houses … a place with many dark secrets—some of which might just kill her.
- Follow Me Down: A Reckless Book—set at the same time as The Ghost of You.
- In the wake of the 1989 earthquake, Ethan takes a trip to San Francisco to search for a missing woman. But almost immediately, he finds himself going down a path of darkness and murder in a case, unlike anything he’s faced before.
- More to come…