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.
Do these Criminal comics all tie in? I mean are they in The same town and have cross-over people.
LikeLike
Yes they’re all connected in that way. Same places and same recurring characters. And while each comic is a standalone story you do have a sense of a longer arc playing out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I like books that do that too.
LikeLike
Diary of a Madman!
Sounds like a couple of blogs I know.
ba dum tish!
LikeLike
Or Ozzy Osbourne’s second album . . .
LikeLiked by 1 person
Has he died yet? Every time I think he’s dead, I find out I’m mistaken.
LikeLike
Pretty sure he’s dead.
(Runs up the stairs to the library of dusky tomes containing all recorded birth and death dates.)
Yep, died in July of last year.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ok, then I can check that off my mental checklist.
I raise a celebratory twinkie while watching the nor’easter going on outside.
LikeLike
Bad weather? At least you’re not out in it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yep, from now through Monday some time. Good time to be home snug as a bug and with pizza in the oven 😀
LikeLike
These sound so bleak I have to wonder what one is supposed to be getting from them. You know the old noir, where the hero’s a guy with his own code just trying bring a sense of order and justice to an amoral world. I mean, we all feel that way sometimes. You can see the appeal. What’s the appeal here?
LikeLike
The “good” characters in the series have some redeeming features and a code of honour. Even if they are criminals in a technical sense. And there are good cops as well as bad cops. Overall the tone is pretty bleak though. I think they just want to show this world where the city is a jungle and you have to choose between shades of gray.
LikeLike
Good description!
Still too depressing for me, though……….
LikeLike
Sounds like Iris and Kurtz are not a match made in heaven.
LikeLike
There’s no good match for either of them, I’m afraid.
LikeLiked by 1 person