A Hometown, an Investigation, a Horror: On "Friday"
Thoughts on comics. So many comics.
I don’t entirely know why, but it’s starting to feel like the right time to get this newsletter properly up and running. I’ve been thinking about storytelling a lot lately, and something seems to have locked into place in my brain; a sense of “oh, right, this is how this works.” I’m also going to try to get these written a bit in advance, so as not to fall behind. This is a running theme in my life right now.
This is Postcards From Komiksoj, where I write about comics and storytelling. And hopefully, these will be sent out every two weeks or so.
Discussed: Friday Book One: The First Day of Christmas
Friday began its life as an online comic serialized on Panel Syndicate, with the first collected edition released via Image. It’s written by Ed Brubaker, drawn by Marcos Martin, and features colors by Munsa Vicente. The story finds one Friday Fitzhugh, onetime teen detective, returning to her hometown on a holiday break from college. Soon enough, she’s reteamed with sleuthing partner Lancelot Jones on a mysterious chase through the woods, “like her life was a record needle stuck in an endless groove,” as Brubaker’s omniscient narration phrases it.
As they chase down their target, the memorably-named Weasel Wadsworth, the rules of this narrative seem to be pretty clear. If you grew up reading, say, the Encyclopedia Brown series or anything similar, you’re familiar with the terrain. Brubaker himself dubs this a work of “post-YA” in his notes at the end of the collected edition.
Here’s why this all comes together so well. From the outset, Brubaker is making the tropes he’s working with here all too clear -- the kid detectives, the small-town setting, the low-key mysteries. I haven’t read an Encyclopedia Brown book in decades, but I’ll have the name of series antagonist Bugs Meany etched into my brain until my dying day.
But that’s the thing about tropes that feel familiar: that lets a talented creator take the story in unexpected directions. And when Friday and Lancelot catch up with Weasel, he’s in an almost primal state, talking about a god or demon called “the White Lady.” (Side note: given that the Brubaker-penned Sleeper prominently featured a character named Miss Misery, I think it’s fair to say that the man is fond of the occasional Elliott Smith reference.) We’ve begun things in the kid-detective sphere, but that record needle that Friday had so loathed is about to be dragged out of its groove and onto another album entirely.
Here’s a hint: this one’s got more than a little horror in it. Brubaker has mashed together crime fiction and horror before -- including in the series Fatale, which he created along with regular collaborator Sean Phillips. Martin is a very different artist from Phillips, though, and this gives Friday a very different sense of mood. Some of that is due to Martin’s design of the title character, with huge eyes, even larger hasses, and red hair. As befits a detective, Friday is a keen observer, and that’s a skill that has served her well in this book’s backstory -- including a number of panels that evoke the adventures Friday and Lancelot had while growing up, often laid out in the style of a book for younger readers.
There’s also the way that Martin draws the town of Kings Hill, which immediately feels both lived-in and movingly present. The book’s third chapter opens with Friday walking through the town on a snowy winter’s night, and the small details there -- from piles of snow amassing to the raised lettering on a local bookstore’s sign -- are precisely done, the kind of synchronicity of art and coloring that happen with a creative team is in sync. The same convergence can be seen in a flashback, earlier in the book, to a young Friday playing hockey; there, Vincente uses a precise shade of color for the sky that evokes the particular clarity that comes with a winter afternoon.
But what sticks with me most about this collection -- and with the series as a whole -- is the way that Brukbaker’s narrative both subverts and embraces the genre tropes at hand here. A decade ago, Brubaker wrote an extended riff on Archie comics in the Criminal arc The Last of the Innocent, which also found Phillips making some unexpected stylistic choices to show what the rot at the center of an Archie-esque universe might be like. (This was, let’s remember, before Riverdale had ever aired.) Go back another decade and you’ll find Deadenders, Brubaker’s collaboration with artist Warren Pleece, which also took a group of young friends with an archetypal dynamic and placed them in a dissonant setting -- in this case, an authoritarian future years after a bizarre apocalyptic event has taken place.
Riffing on these kinds of tropes can lead to memorable work -- I’ve had Joe Meno’s The Boy Detective Fails stuck in my head for years after reading it, and I’ve dabbled in this kind of work myself. But there’s something about Friday that clicks especially well. It’s the sound of a creative team converging on all levels, and taking the reader to a series of thrillingly unexpected places along the way.
As always, I'm Tobias Carroll, and this has been Postcards From Komiksoj.
This newsletter is free, but if you’re so inclined, I have a page at Ko-Fi where you can buy me a (metaphorical) cup of coffee. My novel In the Sight is available here, and details on upcoming readings can be found here.
If you're interested in buying any of the books reviewed in these pages, most of them can be ordered via Bookshop.