So, albeit two weeks late, my copy of writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips new Criminal mini-series The Last of the Innocent finally arrived.
With the weight of Incognito: Bad Influences still having me feel like I missed something (at which I will at some point later this year go back and read again), there was a part of me that was slightly hesitant to return to the world of Criminal. However, with my weakness for tough guys, schmoes, dames, and people always in danger ( see my current Coen brothers film fest entries...correlation perhaps??), it was just too hard to say no to another slice of noir-ish peanut butter and chocolate.
While this volume of the series does have all those attributes mentioned, it is the theme of never being able to go home again that resonates the hardest in this issue. Much like Teeg Lawless in The Dead and The Dying, Riley Richards has a heavy sense of hopelessness. With an ill father, woman issues, and an embarrassment of vices which have put him in an uncomfortable spot, Riley is the archetype of a Brubaker protagonist, but it is the physical location of the town Brookview that is the star. Brookview is the image of an America that no longer exists ( as Riley states, " Feels like it's always raining in the city, but of course its sunny here. Hell, I can barely remember a day when it wasn't), with the present slowly corroding the edges.
The present is past, as1982 is the year of this chapter, and the parallels to the combustible Regean-era America is very subtle here through small visual indications ( one in particular is of some punks in the diner at an impromptu reunion). Riley remembers a Brookview that is straight out of an Archie comic, and Sean Philips does an amazing homage by giving us flashbacks in that style. As I am not into spoilers, I wont say anything else about this issue, but it has perhaps one of the finest final scenes and lines in quite some time. Let's hope #2 gets here on time! **Oh, and the final essay by Brubaker in this issue is lovely**
Part of my dwindling coursework ( which should be done for good next spring) deals with studying brain based, or cognitive, learning. In keeping with my insistence on testing the various theories in my coursework, I am starting a new reading regiment. Basically, I am adding more holistic based methods (themes, cognitive mapping), and I will go about breaking up more reading into smaller increments, i.e. one hour of theory, thirty minutes of classical literature, two hours of pdf files, etc. We shall see how it rolls.....
This week, the Coen brothers 2011 fest continues with the most polarizing films of the canon, Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. After much debate, it was decided that folks should watch these two at some point by Sunday at their leisure, as we are, to a degree, selling the potential of these films short based on memory. [shrugs] Maybe we are wrong, but we are going to find out. Feel free to join in with comments about these films via twitter @jldprod2002 or here at the blog.
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