Unbagging Giant Size Criminal
Giant Size Criminal
#1A
Sean Phillips Regular
| Release: | Dec 03, 2025 |
Creators
| Writer | Ed Brubaker |
| Artist | Sean Phillips |
| Cover Artist | Sean Phillips |
And the next thing I know I’m taking another hit without even thinking.
People who know me know that I love the dynamic duo that is Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.
Whenever they put out something new, I’m ready to buy it.
While I think they’re a team that can tell any kind of story they want to, they obviously excel at the kind of grimy, in the gutter noir stories that they’ve perfected in the Criminal universe.
The same approach works well in other stories – such as the Reckless books – but it’s always nice to return to familiar territory with familiar names and faces.
Even though all of the stories are set in a connected “universe,” each story arc stands alone and does not depend on having read any of the others, though if you have read the others, you’re rewarded with the comforting familiarity of, like Captain America – a character Ed Brubaker had a lengthy run writing – understanding references.
If this issue is your first time plumbing the scummy depths of Criminal, there’s a section that provides some background on the setting and some of the prominent characters that can serve as a primer for the uninitiated and a refresher for old heads like me.
It also serves as a preview of what is to come on the live-action series adapting the books that is, as the back cover says, coming soon to a streaming service near you.
Some of those prominent characters are members of the appropriately named Lawless family. There’s Teeg, the patriarch, a legendary figure in the local underworld, his oldest son Tracy, who joined the military in an effort to escape what seemed to be his destiny, and his youngest, Ricky, the perpetual fuck-up who serves as the main character of this particular story.
Criminal stories often take place at different times, typically within a time span from the early 1970s to the present day.
This one takes place in 2004, and in it, as we so often do, we find Ricky in hot water.
He has some major gambling debts, and so to pay them off he’s agreed to take a job to cover them. There’s a professional poker player in town for a big tournament, and he’s likely to win the big prize or at least walk away with a substantial amount of money.
Ricky is tasked with breaking into the gambler’s hotel room, waiting for him to return from the tournament, and then just rob him of that substantial amount of money. Simple enough.
Unless you’re Ricky Lawless.
While Ricky manages to disguise himself as a bellhop and get into the room to lie in wait, things start to go south when he decides to pass the time by doing some coke.
The problem is what he thought was coke turns out to be heroin.
To try to shake off the effects and avoid nodding off, he orders room service, charging it to the room.
That doesn’t help.
It especially doesn’t help when he absentmindedly snorts even more heroin.
As the night progresses, he finds himself losing time, waking up on the bed, finding himself taking a bath, and then hitting the mini bar.
Then he either has sex with an escort who shows up at his door because she’d been told at the front desk – because of Ricky’s room service order – that the gambler was back and who may have been trying to rob him, or rather, the gambler…
…or he may have just passed out watching porn on pay-per-view and dreamed the whole thing.
While sitting on the couch watching cartoons, he has a memory of another time earlier in his life that he found himself sitting on a couch in a hotel room watching cartoons. A brief memory that reveals a lot about his life and his relationship with his father, and is a nice little glimpse of the complex character of Teeg Lawless for those of us who are familiar with him.
Eventually, he nods off again and receives a much ruder awakening in the form of the room’s occupant kicking the shit of him.
But Ricky is feeling no pain and quickly turns the tables. He grabs what he came for, but doesn’t get away entirely cleanly.
But at least he manages to get away with the money he needs, right?
Right?
Yeah, about that.
Turns out Ricky actually managed to fuck things up even before he snorted all that heroin.
Additional twists and turns await anyone who reads the full story rather than relying on my little recap, and if you do so, you’ll also be rewarded with more of that stylish Sean Phillips art with its clean, simple lines and inky blacks that give it grit and texture.
I don’t know if it’s officially a trend to bust out the old-school newsprint, but I have to say that this is an instance in which gimmicky nostalgia pays off, as it really adds something to the look of the art.
The muted, hard-edged colors manage to pop on the paper.
It also fits the story – Ricky Lawless is not some slick, glossy gangster, he’s a gritty, cheap thug who’s barely worth the paper he’s printed on.
As noted at the start, there’s some bonus content in the form of character information as well as some background on how Criminal first came about.
There’s also an included Criminal RPG called “Criminal Flushed” from Kieron Gillen, and a couple of one-page comics related to the making of the show.
Overall, it’s a great introduction to the world of Criminal for anyone who’s new to it and a nice little treat for those of us who have been fans from the start.
I know many people find Brubaker and Phillips to be hit-or-miss, but while I have once found myself somewhat underwhelmed by one of their books, they always hit for me, and this was no exception.
It was a Giant Size success.
Born and raised in the sparsely populated Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Jon Maki developed an enduring love for comics at an early age.
