Ed Brubaker is an award-winning comic scripter who has written about superheroes and superheroines. However, the man has a heart carved from the deepest, darkest noir. His criminals and anti-heroes sing with muscle, malice, and desperation, lifting from the pages to hold readers hostage to their own need to know what's going to happen next.

My first brush with Brubaker came through a four-issue comic series from Vertigo - the adult, edgy line published by DC Comics. I enjoyed the private eye feel of the story and couldn't help comparing it to Raymond Chandler novels. I'm certain that's what Brubaker intended.

However, with Criminal: Coward, the first volume in Brubaker and Sean Phillips's ongoing series, the storytelling drives drastically into Humphrey Bogart and Jim Thompson territory. Leo Patterson is the kind of guy Bogart would have portrayed on the screen and Thompson would have written about in his crime novels.

See, it's not enough that Leo is a professional criminal. He's also trying to take care of Ivan, his father's one-time criminal associate. Years ago, Leo's dad and Ivan raised Leo in a life of crime, taught him everything he needed to know to become a professional pickpocket. Leo graduated from that and became a heist artist, stealing from banks and armored cars, cracking places and organizations that were supposedly impenetrable. Now Ivan's a junkie and struggling with Alzheimer's, and no one else is there to take care of him.

That part of Leo's motivation for everything that follows is magic. No matter what he does, he's trapped, struggling and trying to take care of Ivan. The old man doesn't make it easy, either. He's constantly chasing off the nurses Leo is forced to hire to take care of him. Leo talks about family a lot, and that's what much of Brubaker's exploration of the criminal element in this series seems to be about. All these families seem inevitable, and they're all inextricably tied up with each other.

I enjoyed the way Brubaker and Phillips start the graphic novel in mid-bank robbery, with the wheels coming off and everything going wrong. A sense of immediacy instantly pulled me in, and I was hanging onto every frame of Phillips's gorgeous art as the dice continued to roll snake eyes on the robbery.