The two specialists of the thriller in comics are back. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips invite you to spend A Cruel Summer with them at Delcourt. And if it heats up, it has nothing to do with the heat wave.
A summer with the family
A cruel summer plunges the reader into 1988 between two generations of mobsters. On the one hand, Father Teeg Lawless is in full success while he has managed the most important theft of his career. On the other hand, his sixteen-year-old son Ricky seeks to follow in his footsteps but with relative success. He goes at night to the house of an old spoiler with a beautiful diamond necklace. But he is spotted by the owner. Ricky hits him, certain to get away with it, but no one escapes his fate during the cruel summer. In another city, an overly talkative private and a femme fatale are chatting in a bar. Nothing seems to bring this quartet together but chance and love take care of bringing them together. These characters are a few pieces on a large chessboard written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Sean Phillips. A cruel summer is, as its title suggests, a dark tale. Romantic relationships are ephemeral and most often pathetic. Men are in no way heroes but losers who have missed their chance or who start their careers in crime very badly. No one is innocent while everyone thinks they are doing good. A friendly old man turns out to be a selfish thief who betrays his friends. Tegg thinks he's a good father, but he hits his son hard. The contradictions of each lead them to dead ends because, like characters of Greek tragedy thinking they are free, fate actually pushes them towards an increasingly dark future. To pay his father's bail, young Ricky did not rob just any old man but Mack the monster is linked to the mafia. His father understands this when he gets out of prison and must render a service to compensate for his son's serious mistake.
A long summer
After the dense but short Pulp, writer Ed Brubaker and penciller Sean Phillips return to a longer format of 300 pages that evokes their previous masterpiece, Fade to Black. A cruel summer unfolds within their vast saga Criminal which already has seven volumes. This complete story in one volume is not a sequel but a special issue. Like Sale Week-end, we can read this thriller without knowing anything about the rest but the enthusiast will find places and characters: a bar that serves as a base for the local mafia but especially the magnificent looser Teeg Lawless. Criminals form a community where, while everyone knows each other, few people love or trust each other. Even in the informal economy, human beings are exploited by the system. For fans of Criminals, A Cruel Summer is far from anecdotal but, matured for years by the screenwriter, it is a cornerstone of his saga by going back to the sources of the trauma of Tegg, Ricky and his friends. More than about crime, the duo Brubaker and Phillips compose a work about the past and failure. At the beginning of the book, the old man has forgotten all the present but remembers his glorious past as a boxer under the name of Mack the Monster. He became famous in postwar Japan by becoming the villain to be beaten in the wrestling ring by anti-American sentiment. Teeg went from a successful thief to an all-too-notorious alcoholic to continue in crime. If you were looking for a good thriller to spend your holidays, A cruel summer is for you. The sand and sweetness of summer are far from Brubaker and Phillips' visions, but cold fate clutches the criminals. The authors offer Criminal fans a major narrative going back to the sources of evil. The worst thing is that we ask for more so much these artists make us penetrate the depth of human psychology and the inhumanity of society. You can find other columns related to these authors with Pulp and Texas Blood.
