Page 45 Review by Stephen
Where the body was, sure, but also where their minds were at.
What a cracking cover. Is it my cover of the year? It is my cover of the year - and by my watch it's only January.
Delve swiftly in, and it's the first Sean Phillips book to thrust so much exuberantly enjoyed sex in your face. It's so sex-positive, with such classily composed and coloured nudity, that we're not even going to need to rack our crime section elsewhere. Key words: 'enjoyed', 'classily' and 'composed'.
This is also the first Brubaker book since THE FALL, his much missed 30-year-old collaboration with Jason Lutes, which is set in these sorts of leafy sunny suburbs where it's all happening behind the white-washed picket fencing, and the light, thanks to Jake Phillips, is phenomenal: flushed hot orange for the sex scenes, outside there are lots of lemons and limes, a glorious green and golden light to look back on.
And that is precisely what's happening here. Memories long marinated in personal nostalgia for (and curiosity about) their own past come tumbling onto the page as each partial witness is asked to recall from different distances what they made of their neighbours' often curious behaviour before and during that summer - as well as their own. What evolves is a supremely satisfying narrative built from multiple points of view whose limited perspectives - what was seen on the street, perhaps glimpsed through windows or overheard in passing - subtly combine to give only readers a wider sweep of the full facts, as well as the emotional landscape.
Or, as the publisher writes, "Starting with a map of the crime scene, this murder mystery follows the ripples of this killing as they echo through decades of love and loss and passion and violence."
It may look like a whodunit, but I would sly suggest to you that it's more of a WHO done WHAT exactly, and I particularly relished the length and depth of the post-denouement.
Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month January 2024.
Late announcement, that: supply has proved problematic!
