Scene of the Crime
Brubaker’s scripts are a big deal nowadays, and he has a handful of Eisners to prove it, but this deluxe edition of a four-issue miniseries (first published by Vertigo in 1999) shows how he made his mark—and marks the first of many fine collaborations with penciller Lark and inker Phillips. San Francisco PI Jack Herriman finds a woman’s missing sister and reports back that she’s OK. But the next morning, she’s dead, and a stricken Herriman is determined to find out why. The trail leads him into the past, to a sex cult founded long after the Summer of Love. Some growing pains are evident, most noticeably in the ridiculously wordy word balloons. But otherwise this is wonderful stuff, an atmospheric and darkly twisted tale that inverts some clichés (the PI is a scruffy, young former addict) while tipping the fedora to others (his uncle is a crime-scene photographer like Weegee). Bonus materials include a revealing afterword by Brubaker, side-by-side pages showing how the pencils became inked, and “Gods and Sinners,” an earlier Herriman story from Vertigo: Winter’s Edge, v.2 (1999). This was outlined as a longer series, notes the author; why the publisher dropped it is a mystery. --Keir Graff