"Criminal: Coward" is a classic noir tale with shady characters and overwhelming sense of doom

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' comic book serial, Criminal, is dark all around.  There are no good guys, only fallen heroes and femme fatales who will drag the "hero" down an even darker path.  Each issue is like an episode of a classic 1940s film noir featuring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, their fates already sealed well before they've been tempted by the devil.

In Criminal: Coward, Leo Patterson, a lifelong crook whose skill lies in being able to get away from any sticky situation, gets involved in a complicated heist after being talked into it by an old 'friend' and a crooked cop.  After the so-called robbery goes awry, bodies begin to pile up, police are quickly involved, and gangsters come looking for the loot that was originally theirs.  Involved also is Greta, Leo's old friend, and a needy mother to her young daughter; Ivan, the old man with a heroin addiction that Leo takes care of; and Roy L.T., a terrifying gangster who has a stake in Leo and Greta's abduction of a briefcase of heroin, the "loot" they stole from an armored police car in hope it was packed with diamonds and stones instead.

Brubaker creates a shady world where no one can be trusted, where police are just as crooked and dangerous as mobsters, and where ruthless murders are as common as cigarettes that are barely hanging on the mouths of every antagonist and protagonist alike.  The artwork by Phillips is also just as dark - literally and figuratively - and that style remains consistent throughout.  Reading Coward, we get the impression that the story takes place in some Earthly form of hell, where evil is the omnipresent and only force these characters know.  By the time we get to the dreary third act, we realize there is no other way this tale could've possibly ended.  The protagonist ends up reaping what he sows, as he well should have.

Judged as a simple noir story, Coward is more or less standard of the genre, not offering anything new, but also not disappointing.  However, if viewed as a comic, it has plenty of style and more than enough fresh and quotable lines that can stay with the reader well after they've turned the last page.  Leo may not be a coward after all, but he sure is one memorable criminal.
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