Five Gears in Reverse

This 12th entry in Brubaker and Phillips’s long-running “Criminal” series (after The Knives) is a lean, bruising crime story that both rewards longtime readers and provides the perfect jumping-on point for newcomers. When an attempt to rob a world-champion poker player in order to settle his debt to a vicious bookie goes wrong, Ricky Lawless finds himself navigating a series of potentially deadly situations in which every decision he makes is compounded into another catastrophe that pulls him further into a spiral of escalating violence and betrayal that threatens to consume both him and his partner-in-crime and paramour, Mallory. Brubaker’s script moves briskly but allows space for character beats that give weight to the chaos, steadily delving deeper into how Ricky’s swaggering bravado masks a persistent sense of doom. Phillips’s art, supported by Jacob Phillips’s muted, noir-inflected colors, remains a master class in visual storytelling and establishing atmosphere—rain-soaked streets, claustrophobic interiors, characters’ gestures and facial expressions do as much storytelling here as the dialogue.