Daniela Marino

Essay Assignment # 2

Comic Books and Graphic Novels

Criminal: Volume 2, Bad night

Prof. Kuskin

Ed Brubaker (words) and Sean Phillips

All we need is. Closure!

One should never leave things unsaid or undone. I need closure! Thats what

we hear all the time in movies. That feeling of leaving something unfinished can

consume you from inside out nights and nights in a roll. What have I done wrong? How

can I change? How can I go on? It seems that this need for a closure is what moves

many of us on and it is not different for Jacob in his Bad Night of Criminal volume 2.

Although we only have a page to analyze, this one page is all it takes for us to

get some ideas that I believe are found in the whole serie of Criminal. In this three by

three grid page with a strong noir atmosphere we find Jacob alone in his apartment. He

is a cartoonist, whose strips can be seen in the local newspaper every day. He has

deadlines and he doesnt seem to care. Why?

The telephone rings. Its his editor. He leaves a message because Jacob wouldnt

answer What is that in his life or in his past that makes him look as he has a burden to

carry? He doesnt seem happy, even if we think that he probably loves what he does, his

apartment is dark as it is a reflection of his life.

Maybe we could find some hints about his personality by paying close attention

to his cartoon. His name is Frank Kafka and he is a private detective. Would be Kafka

his alter ego? After all, his name itself is an allusion to the popular Czech writer who

told the strange story of a man who is transformed in a cockroach in his book The

Metamorphosis. A superficial analyze of it would tell us he is a man who looks for a

change, but at the same time, he is stuck to an event in his past that doesnt allow him to

move on and yet, he has developed a method to do so:

I try to always leave a strip in progress, but close to being done That way, the next day you have something to start right in on because that last panel calls out to you like an unfinished sentence. (Brubaker, Criminal: volume 2. P. 3)

It is a common sense to think that a work tells us more about the writer than any

biography and if we consider so, what led Ed Brubaker to create a comic inside a comic

would be to give us some perspective about Jacob using a very original way to make us

understand the protagonists personality, but even more than that, what Jacob thinks

about his methods is exactly what calls our attention to the way he feels.

By taking a look at the fourth panel, we recall one of the lectures of professor

Kuskin telling us that one of the reasons why comics can be so appealing is because

most of times they also tell us about ourselves, so by letting us know about his method

which is actually Archie Lewis he makes us think about our search for meaning and

continuation in our own lives and as in life, this page leaves us with more question than

answers, but still, it is exactly what a noir comic is supposed to do.

In order to find some meaning or to make any guesses we need to allow

ourselves to sink into each panel and feel all the tension of this thriller-like story: from

the first panel to the fourth Jacob is really concentrated in what he is doing even when

interrupted by the phone and then, on the fifth he goes away leaving the clock on the

sixth panel to remind the reader that it is time to go, but together with the pictures we

have his lines explaining why he always leaves something undone, so then he has

something to hold on to, as we would like to believe we could do in life. Somehow, it is

like his life depends on that sequence of repetitive events and so does ours. He feels safe

that way why? What skeletons is he hiding in his closet?

Although we may never know the answer for those questions, what we do know

is that this need of closure is something relevant for all of us and by leaving something

behind we can wake up the next day with a purpose. This need is what makes us hope

for something better every day and maybe that is exactly what Jacob longs the most:

some closure.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

Franz Kafka