Criminal, Volume 3: The Dead and the Dying Book

"Nothin' but the dead and dyin' in my little town."'Paul Simon

In the third volume we circle back to the roots of the murders in the first two volumes. Teeg Lawless, like his son, a veteran, but of Vietnam, not Iraq, illustrates a noir tenet: The chickens come home to roost or, the past will come back to bite your ass. The storytelling in this volume is ambitious, complicated, interesting, a story told from three different perspectives in each of three separate issues collected here:

"Second Chance in Hell," told from the perspective of Jake "Gnarly" Brown, whose friendship with Sebastian reveals friction when femme fatale Danica Briggs chooses Sebastian, which turns out (not surprisingly; it's noir!) to be a very, very bad choice.

"A Wolf Among Wolves" features Teeg Lawless, who returns from Nam with unpaid gambling debts from the time before he had left. He needs to make money fast, and encounters Danica in the Undertow Bar, who suggests a way to get out of his predicament fast. What's not to like?

"The Female of the Species" ties the previous two stories together and links to the first two volumes, focusing on Danica. A heist, a love triangle, revenge, what else do you need?

This volume, which I had a hard time following when I first read it, I understand better on reread in terms of the whole series, and I think it's great. There's a nod to the "blaxploitation period of the seventies. Great stuff. You maybe didn't know you needed to read crime comics, but Brubaker and Phillips will tell you different.