I think every title I’ve written about up until now is in print, available digitally, or from the library. But, as with today’s two books, that won’t always be the case. Both of these books are out of print, not available digitally, and from a now defunct Fantagraphics line. Used copies are floating around but they’re a little pricey. I didn’t even realize they were out of print when I pulled them off the shelf.

There are two titles under the Wish You Were Here subtitle: The Innocents and They Found the Car. Story and art for both books are by Gipi, an Italian artist and writer. They were part of the Ignatz line of books from Fantagraphics that Igort edited or curated. While the books are numbered they are more of a thematic pairing. So even if you see either of these out in the wild somewhere, grab them!

The Innocents. Wish You Were Here was published in 2005. It tells a really simple story on the surface that hides a lot of depth. A grown man and now reformed criminal takes his nephew out for the day when he gets a call from one of his old running buddies and the two go to meet him. This is a story where the crimes are kept way the hell off the page and focuses on the psychological development and growth of these characters. The reformed man has come along way and his growth is really highlighted when we meet the friend, who is a jittery mess still living in the past. The flashbacks are rendered in a sketchy style where the lines look as if they are going to fall right off the page underscoring the fragile nature of memory. The flashbacks add depth to the two men in a meaningful way and Gipi isn’t afraid to keep vital information off the page and let the reader fill in the gaps.

“What does that mean? Whatever you want it to mean. Are these movies “the best”? Are they our favorites? Are they “movies we got to see before the deadline”? In my case, it’s some combination of all three — but I’m really quite happy with the aggregate results.” — Jim Emerson

When I used to do annual lists at Spinetinger years ago I usually included the above quote and jokingly called it the annual invocation. As a reminder that while we may use the term "best of..." it's really just favorites of what I’ve read so far.

As usual let me say that I haven't read every crime comics that came out in 2025 so this list may not represent the best crime comics but I sure dig them

Humble Bundle currently has a huge bundle of Image comics from the ‘10s going. $18 gets you 175 books. Some of which are crime comics or crime comics adjacent. It’s a great deal.

Deadly Class Vols. 1 - 8

There is currently a Brian Michael Bendis Jinxworld bundle running over at Fanatical. $14.99 will get you the full bundle including all of the below crime titles:

Scarlet

(Sorry for the delay, things have been busy.)

Here is the second part to the big round-up of crime comics released in 2025.

Part one can be found here.

The Best Crime Comics of 2024 post from last year over at DSD

Brian from the future: Here’s part 2!

(The Best Crime Comics of 2024 post from last year over at DSD)

I wanted to try and round up as many 2025 crime comics releases as I could. I won’t sit here and tell you that I have all of them but I probably have a lot of them.

A thief in Paris planned to steal some paintings from the Louvre.

After careful planning, he got past security, stole the paintings, and made it safely to his van.

However, he was captured only two blocks away when his van ran out of gas. When asked how he could mastermind such a crime and then make such an obvious error, he replied, 'Monsieur, that is the reason I stole the paintings.'

I had no Monet

To buy Degas

To make the Van Gogh.

I had De Gaulle to post this because I figured I had nothing Toulouse

(swiped from the internet)

Recent news influenced today’s post. On October 19th, eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels were stolen from the Louvre. The robbers, disguised as construction workers, used a monte-meuble (like a hydraulic furniture lift, to access the building from the street. They cut through the glass, tripped the alarm, grabbed nine pieces of jewelry, dropped one of them, and got away. The entire heist took just a few minutes.

As expected, people on social media had a blast with the story making jokes about The Muppets, George Clooney’s Ocean’s 11 crew, and many others.

Days after an image of a nattily dressed man started to circulate with the speculation and a living fan fiction was born that he was a well dressed French detective brought into crack the case.

On October 3rd, Netflix dropped Monster: The Ed Gein Story so maybe it’s time we covered some serial killer books.

One of the great non-fiction crime comics is Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done? By Eric Powell and Harold Schechter.

It’s a thoroughly researched book that doesn’t indulge in romanticizing Gein while acknowledging his influence on the pop culture landscape and popular imagination. If you haven’t read it, you should.

Another pair of 2025 releases this week. I’ll probably do a couple more of these 2025 release posts this month and the big 2025 round up in a few weeks.

Title: Kosher Mafia
Credits: Author: David Hazan, Illustrated: Sami Kivelä, Colorist: Ellie Wright, Letterer: Simon Bowland
Availability: Print, digital, digital library services
Plot Summary: In Cleveland, Ohio, in 1936, Howard Berkowicz, the bookkeeper for the Jewish Mob finds himself on the wrong end of an enforcer’s gun when he tries to spur the Kosher Mafia into action against the rising tide of domestic Nazism in the German American Bund.
Review: Kosher Mafia opens with Ephraim Gold, a heavy, paying a visit to the house of Howard Berkowicz, a bookkeeper for the Jewish Mob in Cleveland. Gold is there ostensibly to implement Berkowicz’s euphemistic retirement plan. They wind up having a conversation instead. Berkowicz is worried about the rise of the Nazis and Hitler in Europe and thinks that American Jews, especially the organization he works for, should be doing more. Howard’s problem, for all the characters and even the reader at times, is that he’s sanctimonious about it. Ephraim calls him on it at the end of their conversation: “If I’m a criminal and a killer and a ganif…so is the man who makes sure I get paid.”

The two set off on the run from the Jewish Mob to try and do their part to expose a white supremacist group. I wanted more genre thrills from this and Howard Berkowicz isn’t a particularly compelling character. He’s right, duh we know that from a historical perspective, but Jewish gangsters vs. Nazis is too good of a hook. The book seems to know this. Near the end, it has Ephraim say:

Title: The Brownout Murders: A True Crime Graphic Novel, Set In 1942
Writer(s): Luke C. Jackson, Kelly Jackson
Artist(s): Maya Graham
Availability: Print, digital, digital library services
Plot Summary: They blamed alcohol. They blamed men. But they blamed women most of all.

This week I’ve got a couple of newer releases. I’m still working on the big round-up post of 2025 releases and the plan still is to post reviews of some of the 2025 release that I’ve read as a lead up to that post. This week, a pair of eccentric casts.

Title: Night People
Writer(s): Chris Condon, Barry Gifford
Artist(s): Brian Level, Alexandre Tefenkg, Artyom Topilin, Marco Finnegan
Availability: Print, digital, digital library services
Plot Summary: A pair of murderous lovers in Florida carrying out a bloody agenda. A perverse political and religious power struggle between a brother and a sister. An easygoing drifter who suddenly finds himself a fugitive on the run. And a bright-eyed young girl discovering her place in the cold dark world. At the end of the twentieth century, chaos and horror were the American dream.
Review:

This week I’m reviewing two books called Bastard. Each book features a young protagonist and how they navigate relationships with their criminal parents in criminal situations. Under such pressure cooker situations, will the central relationships survive? 

Two minor programming notes: For the first time I decided to just use the plot description from the publisher and put all the information about the book in a header at the start of the review instead of summarizing in the review. The second Bastard review is a 2025 release. I’m working on a large round-up post of 2025 releases that will probably run in a few weeks. Until that guide is ready to go, I’m going to review some of the 2025 titles I’ve read as a lead up to that round-up post. If you have any thoughts on either of these programming notes or if you want to make sure a 2025 crime comic title is on my radar screen, shoot me a message!

I paired these two titles together because of the way that they both root a familiar story type in a hyper-specific world and show you the seedy side of that world. Stringer is about a racket stringer for a professional tennis player on the European leg of the pro tour and Freddy Reno Went Missing is about the world of competitive fancy fish breeding. 

One of the great things about Freddy Reno Went Missing is the world that it immerses us in. It takes us to the seedy underbelly of competitive fancy fish breeding. I don’t know if that’s a thing (it isn’t) but I’m immediately invested in this world because of all of the specific details that Don M Patterson lays out: its factions, histories, controversies, and rivalries. Of course this world is also populated with gangsters, spies, crooked cops, tough guys, and insurance claims investigators nicknamed “Possum”.

Freddy’s departure sparks an insurance investigation and that’s when a George Jones lookalike (who insists people can call him “Possum” though they often decline to do so) shows up as the lead character. In a genre of police detectives and PIs, readers can sometimes forget that other types of investigators exist. Hotel detective fiction was once a thing and the insurance investigator is another great way to explore crime fiction because his motivations are different.

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.