See You in the Funny Pages

I started collecting comic books when I was about eight, and for many years took the hobby very seriously indeed--witness the twenty or so longboxes in my basement. Keeping up with the weekly grind of new issues eventually got to feeling too much like work, but by that time collected editions had become more popular, and many of the shelves in my home are filled with them.

My first comic

For several years, however, I barely read comics, for one reason: my eyes. They had deteriorated to such a degree that reading anything required bright light and a lot of concentration, and comics--where the text is often hand-written and cramped--presented especially acute challenges. Several months back, though, I had cataract surgery, and while my eyes will never be perfect, they're good enough that I can again read comics with pleasure, which has led to me revisiting a number of old favorites--some of which belong very much to the crime genre.

Comics and crime have a long history, of course. Dick Tracy remains one of the most popular comic strip characters ever created (and his adventures were penned for many years by superstar mystery writer Max Allan Collins). Batman first appeared in a periodical called Detective Comics, which was mostly about PIs and cops. And of course the lurid crime comics of the 1950s, particularly those from EC Comics, were so heavy with sex and violence that they helped usher in the Comics Code Authority. Today, though, I want to mention a few of my more contemporary favorites (keeping in mind that, as noted above, I've missed a lot of the most recent stuff). If you enjoy crime fiction, maybe you'd like checking out a few of these.

TOP 10. Created by the legendary Alan Moore, this short-lived title was about the cops of the tenth precinct in Neopolis--a city where everyone, including children and many animals, has super powers and alter egos. The streets of Neopolis are alive with aliens, robots, mutants and gods, and it's up to the overworked men, women and beasts of the tenth to keep order. The series balances a lot of elements that shouldn't work together, but do. The art, especially in crowded street scenes, is filled with comic book in-jokes and cameos. The cases, as you might expect, are often bizarre. The cops who make up the central cast, though, and the often fraught relationships between them, are presented with the depth, complexity and nuance of Hill Street Blues or the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain--even if the sergeant is a hyperintelligent dog in an exoskeleton and one of the main detectives a dark elf from another dimension. There were only twelve issues of the regular series, plus a prequel graphic novel and a five-issue spin-off, Smax (about the aforementioned elf visiting home) before Moore left, and you can safely ignore the attempts to continue it without him.

GOTHAM CENTRAL. In a somewhat similar vein, Gotham Central was an 87th Precinct-style series about the police officers in Batman's Gotham City, from writers Ed Brubaker (who wrote about the night shift) and Greg Rucka (who handled the day). This one lasted forty issues. It's a solid, gritty police procedural, with the added element of dealing with a masked vigilante and the maniacs he battles. Brubaker and Rucka keep the material grounded, and there's some really great character work done throughout the series. Despite its brief run, it's been very influential on later series, and some of the characters continue to play prominent roles in the DC universe today.

SIN CITY. Not for the faint of heart. Sin City is writer/artist Frank Miller's love letter to noir and pulp fiction, heavily indebted to writers like Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson. The black-and-white artwork is frequently stunning; the sex is usually graphic; and the violence is brutal and explicit. There's a large cast of characters, with different ones taking center stage for specific story arcs. The fact that those arcs have titles like "A Dame to Kill For" and "That Yellow Bastard" should give you an idea of the playground Miller is working in. There have been two movie adaptations. Avoid the second.

CRIMINAL. Today this is probably the best-known contemporary crime comic, and it's earned a number of awards and a devoted readership. Like Sin City, Criminal, from writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips, is a series of interconnected story arcs with many recurring characters and settings. This is a much more realistic and emotionally layered piece of work, however, and at its best it can stand alongside the novels of people like Richard Stark and Lawrence Block. Absolutely fantastic character development and dialogue, with inventive plots. Start with the first collection, Coward, about the disgraced son of a legendary crook getting dragged into a big job.

STRAY BULLETS. This doesn't get the attention Criminal does, though it started earlier and, I think, was probably a significant influence on the later work. The creation of writer/artist David Lapham, the series once again is made up of a series of stories starring an overlapping set of characters, with special attention to some of the innocent (well, mostly innocent) victims of the mayhem the criminals in the series unleash. The series started in 1995, but there was a long hiatus from 2005 to 2014 with hardly any new material. Be warned: while the series is great, there's some pretty rough stuff in some issues, up to and including child abuse.

So--do you read crime comics? What are some of your favorites? What are some newer titles I should be seeking out?