There are a few crime comic anthologies out there that are worth a look. This week I want to shine a light on them.  

I’m going to lay my cards on the table. I love anthologies, collections, and short fiction. I read a couple of hundred short stories each year. But I often find anthologies to be mixed bags. There’s often a few stories that I love, a few stories that are just fine, and a few that don’t really work for me. I know that the editor is trying to assemble the best group of stories that they can. I’ve edited a couple of anthologies myself and can attest to this. For me, this is the case with comics anthologies too.

The best thing about any comics anthology is the showcase aspect. In one package I’m getting to see a bunch of different writers and artists. If they are new to me, I can track their work down and have an opportunity to try something new to me. Every anthology is a wonderful opportunity.

The downside for me is that the stories are almost always too short. They often read like samplers and the stories often feel like one piece of something larger. Like when you read a good excerpt that cuts out as soon as things start happening. I understand this is a me problem but it can lend itself to a frustrating experience because an expanded version of these stories often don’t exist.

Shaft: A Complicated Man was published by Dynamite Entertainment. Issues 1-6 were collected in 2015. Shaft: Imitation of Life was published by Dynamite Enyertainment. Issues 1-4 were collected in 2017.

Shaft (the character, the film series, and original novels) has a complicated legacy and one of the things that Shaft: A Complicated Man sets out to do is grapple with that legacy.

This week we’re going to talk a little about translated European comics and the bandes dessinée (BD for short). According to Wiki, bandes dessinée “are comics that are usually originally in French and created for readership in France and Belgium.” Just as Japan and manga have a rich history, other countries have rich comics traditions of their own. I’ll confess that I’m still learning about the history of BD comics and comics from other European countries. While I am interested in learning more and reading more titles, I am unfortunately limited by what is available in English translation. The Wikipedia page for bandes dessinée provides an informative overview. 

Even if the term bandes dessinée is new for you, chances are you are familiar with at least a couple of titles and artists. The Smurfs are a huge global phenomenon. The Adventures of Tin Tin is a popular title in the rest of the world. Métal Hurlant was translated into English as Heavy Metal, which had a huge impact on British comics. The artist Jean "Mœbius" Giraud is well known and well respected around the world.

It’s been suggested that one of the big differences between U.S. comics, European comics, and manga is who is in control of the final product. That U.S. comics are more editor driven, European comics are writer/artist driven, and manga have a strong editorial process that leads to a single writer/artist final product. Assuming that structure is correct, even within those systems, there can be great variety. 

There are a few specific characteristics worth talking about that separate some European comics and BDs apart from other types of comics. European comics have a different publishing schedule and they are often (but not always) published as albums. Albums have more pages than issues of comics in the U.S. do and they also have a larger trim size in print than either graphic novels and manga tankobons. The publishing schedule and the larger page size combine to allow for a really rich style of art. This larger canvas allows for greater detail in character design, facial expressions, and backgrounds which results in some gorgeous panels. There comes with BD comics an expectation of high quality.

For the first time in this project, we’re going to talk about another country’s comics industry: Japan and the mighty manga. I’ve read a lot of posts online about crime comics over the years. I like to see what titles are talked about, their frequency, what’s being said about them, and I’m always hoping to find a title that’s new to me. Manga rarely comes up in these discussions. This week, we’re going to finally bring manga into the crime comics conversation. 

An important thing to know about manga, especially for this conversation, is that Japanese comics often run on a different publishing model than the US model. In the U.S., issues are typically published monthly then collected together. In manga, new installments are called chapters and, on average, they have different page counts. New chapters from various titles are bundled together in weekly magazines. Chapters for many titles are also quickly made available in English via various digital platforms like the VIZ or Shonen Jump App. Chapters are also collected into book form, though there can be a longer gap for them to be licensed and published in English. So new chapters of a title are typically published weekly. This can lead to a looser, pulpier, serialized feel because the mangaka (manga writer/artist) and their assistants (if they have them) is cranking the chapters out at a fast pace.

The popularity of 1947’s New Treasure Island by Sakai Shichima and illustrated by Osamu Tezuka created the modern manga industry as we know it today. Tezuka is considered the godfather of manga and it’s been suggested that he is the trunk that all manga branches from.

Last week we talked about long-running U.S.crime comics series. This week I want to talk about the changing nature of the comic series, at least as far as crime comics are concerned. Long running crime comics series that lasted many years and many issues published on a relatively consistent schedule seem to be out and series with a smaller number of issues that can be collected in just a couple of volumes (at most) seem to be in. It seems appropriate to borrow a TV term here, limited series.

I don’t know the answer to this week’s idea. I just want to be up front about that. If someone can shed some light on this, please do. Are publishers only willing to sign off on series that have a finite runtime and a firm end date? Here we have another way that crime comics series can be published. This topic was unintentionally hinted at in the 5 to Get You Started post by including A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance, which ran a complete story at 11 issues. 

Are these books series? Of course. Hell, almost every crime comic published these days in the US might fall into this category. Comics are (mostly) a series medium so this is just another presentation of how the crime comics series can look. And that’s all we’re talking about here, different ways that crime comics series can look. One hundred issues of 100 Bullets is a series and so is eleven issues of A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance. It just feels like the footprint for crime comics series is getting smaller.

That can affect the writing too, right? Now we’re more likely to see a tight story line and less likely to see expansive world-building and room for a larger cast of characters to have their moments and arcs. For the purposes of this post though, I’m not really interested in creating parameters in the way that TV does, only in borrowing a potentially useful term that most folks have some understanding of. We just intuitively understand that 62 episodes of Breaking Bad is different (not better or worse, just different) than 10 episode seasons of Fargo. 

Let’s start creating a foundation for this project. If we’re going to be talking about crime comics, we have to mention the big dogs. Long running U.S. crime comic series that were popular, and well received when they were published, and are still considered great comics and remain popular to this day. To the extent there is a crime comics canon, at least in the sense of those crime comics titles that a lot of people know about, these are a part of it. If you ask most people what the best crime comics are and/or what their favorite crime comics are, there’s a good chance many of them will choose one of these: Sin City by Frank Miller, Criminal by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips, Scalped by Jason Aaron & R. M. Guéra, 100 Bullets by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso, Stray Bullets by David Lapham.

As we’ll discuss in upcoming posts, these aren’t the only crime comics series, the nature of crime comics series in the US also seems to have changed, there are lots of crime comics series from other parts of the world, and these aren’t even the longest running crime comics series (that distinction belongs to a manga). So we’ll start here with these well known titles, then branch out to other parts of the world, then look at how things seem to have changed.

This will be a longer post because there’s a lot to cover. Future posts won’t likely be this long. Each of these five titles have been written about a lot so this post will not be a full review of those titles (and Criminal will soon get a lot more ink when the Prime series comes out). Just an overview and some quick thoughts. Within the past 18 months or so, I’ve re-read Stray Bullets, Criminal, and 100 Bullets and I haven’t yet done a re-read of Sin City and Scalped. I’m not ruling out a deep dive on these titles later on.

Surprise post! Later in the week will be the first scheduled post that talks about Sin City, Criminal, 100 Bullets, Scalped, and Stray Bullets but I wanted to sneak this one in.

One of my all-time favorite film books is Sex and Zen & A Bullet in the Head by Mike Wilkins and Stefan Hammond (1996). It was an early look at Hong Kong genre cinema,  written at a time when films from that country were starting to break out to a wider audience in The West.

The title combines two film titles in a provocative way to draw the attention of readers but also to offer a kind of shorthand clue as to what could be expected. I decided to try something similar for this newletter and took a couple of crime comic titles and combined them in a way that (hopefully) tells the audience what it is about.

Let’s start with a basic question: What are crime comics? This might sound like I’m using a straw (hit)man as an opening but I have actually spoken to a few mystery and crime fiction readers over the years who don’t know the answer. At its simplest, crime comics are the genre of crime fiction (and all of its subgenres and adjacent genres) told in the medium of comics. That’s it.

In his Rough Guide to Crime Fiction, Barry Forshaw wrote, "The genre is a broad church." For fans of crime fiction, the genre currently consists of two main mediums. The first is written (novels and shorter fiction) and the second is visual (films and TV shows). For fans of the genre there is an intermingling of the two approaches. They have favorite thriller novels, noir films, gangster stories, and crime shows.

Crime comics are a third medium that combines the written and visual forms. For many crime fiction readers, crime comics have been hiding in plain sight. They might be unaware of the new releases that come out each year, some of the crime comic classics, the deeper cuts, and comics that are in a sub-genre they love.

Coverage of crime comics has mostly been limited to comic book publications and reviewers. Comic book reviewers cover the genre of crime comics within the scope of their already existing comic book coverage. With the exception of some high profile titles, series, and creators that have broken through and received coverage or mentions, crime fiction reviewers and publications don’t offer as much coverage to crime comics compared to what other mediums like novels, film, and TV might get.