Created by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips
“A private eye is always outside, looking in… It’s lonely, watching everyone else find love and make mistakes… Living wildly… Let me save you from all this… Let us run away together…”
— Jack fantasizes about another life
Taking a break from their acclaimed Reckless series, Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips unleashed the standalone hardcover graphic novel Where The Body Was in late 2023.
Far from the gritty, two-fisted, hard-boiled world of most of their comic work, Where the Body Was is a deliciously dark if not quite noir sucker punch. Theoretically it should be a cozy: a sedate American suburban neighborhood straight outta Spielberg; a place of quiet, tree-lined streets, circa 1984, with a 7-11, a old boarding house at the end of a cul-de-sac, a tree house, a slew of seemingly comfy bungalows and, as presented in the helpful “Cast of Characters,” a closed circle of suspects.
According to Ed, it’s “a crime story is about a bunch of characters who live on the same street, told through a bunch of overlapping perspectives and the endpapers are like a tribute to old mapback covers.”
Among the cast of characters? JACK FOSTER, a private eye looking for a runaway girl. But he’s not the only intriguing character. There’s also a couple of junkies, a loner with a badge, a horny housewife, a workaholic psychiatrist, a homeless Vietnam vet and Lila Nguyen, a precocious ten-year old who’s appointed herself the neighborhood’s super-hero protector–all drawn with a nuanced and empathetic hand by Phillips. These characters fucking come alive!
Like Jack. He’s quietly professional; a methodical investigator who drives a Volkswagen bug and is aware he’s not getting any younger. His role is small, but pivotal, and as the viewpoint slides back and forth between characters, and back in forth in time, the pieces slowly come together, finally clicking into place in a fashion that knocked me for a loop, but left me–once I got over it–applauding it.
Of course. How else could it end?
COMICS
- WHERE THE BODY WAS | Buy the graphic novel | Kindle/ComiXology it!
(2023, Image Comics)
Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
