Meanwhile, the plot twists and turns in unexpected directions, the action scenes are well-spaced apart to keep up the excitement, and you learn bits and pieces of Ethan’s past as you go along, rather than in one heavy info-dump, so there’s never a dull moment - the pacing is masterful.īrubaker’s not doing anything here that we haven’t seen him do before - tailing crooks, tracking down leads, gunfights, bombs, fist-fighting nekkid (ok, maybe that last one’s new!) - but he’s doing it so damn well in this book that I didn’t mind at all. Over the many years he’s been writing these kinds of stories, Brubaker’s perfected the hard-boiled, noirish voice that he uses for Ethan and the words flow easily - it’s an effortlessly compelling read. Like in Criminal with their series regular Tracy Lawless, this book features another tough bastard with an unlikely name: Ethan Reckless. And then an old flame tracks him down with a mission to kill for a fortune - but who’s playing who and what’s Ethan getting himself into?Įd Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ latest is one helluva barnstormer of a comic! From the cracking opener to the multi-layered, tense narrative that slowly unfolds, I was gripped all the way through. You gotta have it.' -Joe Hill (Locke & Key, N0S4A2) Look for Book Two in the RECKLESS series in April 2021!Įthan Reckless: former undercover FBI operative once posing as a ‘60s radical is now banished from the agency and, in 1981 Los Angeles when we catch up with him, he’s a surfer dude who owns a dilapidated movie house downtown. This one comes at you as fast as Steve McQueen in a souped-up Mustang and as hard as Charles Bronson with a baseball bat. 'RECKLESS is an absolute rush: on the same level as golden age Travis McGee novels and the hardest-hitting Richard Stark stories. I love this book.” -Damon Lindelof (Lost, HBO’s Watchmen)

No one does crime fic like BRUBAKER and PHILLIPS and their collaboration has never felt more new. in a serpentine plot that is equal parts Long Goodbye and Point Break. “Imagine Redford at his peak, ambling through sun-drenched, eighties L.A. Working class setting covering up for a deeper societal rot, a battered, damaged (literally) protagonist against the beast, and all of it squirming and lunging through an over-lit early 80s L.A. “Oh man this book pushed EVERY crime fiction button for me. But when a fugitive from his radical student days reaches out for help, Ethan must face the only thing he fears…his own past.

Meet Ethan Reckless: Your trouble is his business, for the right price. A bold new series of original graphic novels, with three books releasing over the next year, each a full-length story that stands on its own. ED BRUBAKER and SEAN PHILLIPS, the modern masters of crime noir, bring us the last thing anyone expected from them-a good guy. Sex, drugs, and murder in 1980s Los Angeles, and the best new twist on paperback pulp heroes since The Punisher or Jack Reacher.

Reckless brubaker reading order