It’s 1988, and Ethan has been hired for his strangest case yet: finding the secrets of a Los Angeles real estate mogul.

It’s 1985, and things in Ethan’s life are going pretty well … until a missing woman shows up in the background of an old B-movie, and Ethan is drawn into Hollywood’s secret occult underbelly as he hunts for her among the wreckage of the wild days of the ’70s.

But when a fugitive from his radical student days reaches out for help, Ethan must face the only thing he fears … his own past.

Meet Ethan Reckless: Your trouble is his business, for the right price.

Launched at the end of 2020, Reckless already count five books, and there are more to come in the near future. In fact, Ed Brubaker drops hints about the characters” lives that can be explored in later books (or it was in a previous one), but it is not required to read all of the books, you can just pick one at random-and read the other after. Each story is self-contained, and you don’t have to read them in chronological order. It comes with the problems he usually tries to fix.Įach book in the Reckless series is set during a specific period, from the wild days of the “70s to the murderous end of the 1980s in Los Angeles. The rest of the time, he is on the beach, surfing, or at the El Ricardo, an old abandoned movie theater, with Anna, his pink-haired assistant-and his only real friend.Įthan is working when he needs to, but also when he gives a damn-not so often. He is just the guy you go to for help with your problems and if he is in the mood, he takes the case. It’s like reading a good old pulp novel, but with Brubaker’s writing, Sean Phillips’s pencils, and Jacob Phillips’s colors, the result could almost qualify as a reinvention of the genre by the form-published by Image Comics.īut what is Reckless about? Well, it is about crimes-the sex, drugs, and murder kind-, but with a hero at the center of the story, or heroes even (if we count Anna, and we count her).Įthan Reckless is a former sixties radical/undercover FBI agent turned fixer-or troublemaker, it depends on the point of view.

Each story is self-contained and collected in one 144-page hardcover graphic novel. It is a new crime series, for sure, but the creative team decided to try a different publication approach. Everything they try is basically a winner. With the award-winning Pulp, the duo confirmed that they don’t even need to connect their work to Criminal anymore-like with My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies-or to another series to find their audiences in a different format. If you talk about the genre, you irremediably think about Criminal, then comes other favorites like The Fade Out, Kill or be Killed, Fatale…

At this point, when it comes to crime comics, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s comics have eclipsed David Lapham’s ( Stray Bullets).

Reckless brubaker reading order