Criminal 4: Bad Night

The fourth volume in the Criminal series is a bit of a side alley off the main mean streets of Center City. Several times in earlier comics we’d seen glimpses of a newspaper serial about a Dick Tracy-clone private investigator named Frank Kafka. And just saying that much I want to stop for a second and wonder when this neo-noir series is set. The stories in the previous volume, The Dead and the Dying, were time-stamped 1972. Bad Night is presumably set a generation later but I don’t think there were many newspapers running serial comic strips around that time. And the nod to Dick Tracy is unambiguous, down to the sharp brim of Frank Kafka’s fedora. I guess it’s always the 1930s or ‘40s in neo-noir, a timeless shade of gray.

Anyway, Bad Night tells the story of Jacob Kurtz, the creator of the Frank Kafka strip. Kurtz is haunted by various demons, including some damaging run-ins with the law years earlier, just after the death of his wife and being busted for his involvement in a counterfeit ring. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what all happened in the past, but it got a police detective named Max Starr (yeah, right) on Jacob’s case and there’s a mutual hate between the two that has continued. This complicates things even more when Kurtz falls in with a femme fatale named Iris and gets involved, against his will, in another bad heist. There seem to be a lot of bad heist plans in this series.

I found it perfectly readable, with all the requisite squalid highlights. Iris, for example, is a nurse and a stripper (virgin and whore), someone so sexually damaged that “to get off, she needed a savagery that bordered on contempt.” Which is another way of saying she has bad taste in men. I had some trouble figuring out what was driving Max Starr though, and the ending seemed a little muddled. Kurtz has visions of Frank Kafka appearing at his side throughout the back half of the book and it’s clear that he (Kurtz) doesn’t enjoy robust mental health, so any conclusions you draw have to be qualified given that you may be reading the diary of a madman.

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