Criminal 8: My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies
The Criminal books are all set in the same world with many recurring characters, but they tend to alternate between ones that follow a broad overarching storyline and others that are more standalones with nothing but passing references to some familiar names. So Bad Night was about the comic strip writer Jacob Kurtz and then The Sinners had Tracy Lawless returning as the protagonist. The Last of the Innocent only mentioned Sebastian Hyde (the city’s crime boss) briefly and then Wrong Time Wrong Place was another Tracy Lawless story.
Which brings us to My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, which deals with a new character in a separate adventure that just includes a phone call to Hyde to resolve the plot.
The central character here is Ellie, a girl with a troubled past who is in a drug rehab facility. While there she meets up with a young man named Skip. They get romantically involved and then break out and live on the run for a while before things come to the usual violent end.
I didn’t think very much of this one. It’s one of the two shortest books in the series, consisting of only a single issue. The story has a simple twist that isn’t too unexpected, and the main interest is in the telling of Ellie’s story through flashbacks. Her mother was a junky and this messed her up so that she idolizes famous people who died from overdoses. She’s also fallen in with a lot of bad people, including Hyde’s gang. There’s a link to the character of Leo from Coward, but that only comes in at the end.
I didn’t know what to make of Ellie’s referencing the song “Stevie Smith” by Vic Chesnutt and quoting from it. She doesn’t mention the fact that the lines she’s quoting, the lyrics of the song, are from the poem “Not Waving But Drowning” by Stevie Smith. I’m assuming though that Ed Brubaker was aware of this and he just didn’t want us to think that Ellie knew.
