Criminal

Criminal is a creator-owned American crime comic written by Ed Brubaker and drawn by Sean Phillips. Launched in 2006 under Marvel's Icon imprint, it moves among thieves, hustlers, and their families rather than following a single hero. Its stories can stand on their own, but recurring people and places gradually reveal how one person's desperate choice becomes someone else's history.

The opening arc, Coward, centers on a heist and the compromises surrounding it. Later stories turn to other corners of the same underworld, including the Lawless family. Image Comics began publishing new editions and stories in 2015, then brought Criminal back as a monthly comic in 2019.

Criminal won the 2007 Eisner Award for Best New Series, an early recognition of how assuredly Brubaker and Phillips had brought noir into the comic-book serial. Its recurring world lets them change the scale of a story: a robbery can become a family inheritance, while a minor figure in one tale can take the lead in another. That flexibility has kept the series open to both short episodes and longer arcs.

The work also reflects a deliberate choice by its makers to build comics they could own and control. Its achievement is less a single ingenious crime than the accumulation of consequences across stories. Readers learn the rules of this world through failed plans, old loyalties, and damage that never stays neatly contained in one volume.

This is noir and crime fiction, not science fiction. Jobs go wrong; trust is provisional; people tell themselves stories about what they will do when the money comes. Coward begins with the familiar machinery of a heist, then shifts attention to fear, judgment, and the cost of survival. The suspense comes from human choices rather than an invented technology or supernatural threat.

Across the series, criminal identity is both chosen and inherited. Brubaker returns to families, mentors, and old associates who make escape difficult even when a character wants it. The shared setting gives those themes weight: a decision that once looked private can reappear years later as somebody else's obstacle.

Phillips draws people who look worn by the rooms and streets they occupy. Heavy blacks, economical faces, and tightly staged conversations keep the focus on what a character might be concealing. Action reads as sudden and physical because the quiet pages have already established who is standing where, and what each person has at stake.

Phillips gives the series its hard-edged noir identity through decisive shadows, carefully spaced figures and a keen sense of what a panel leaves unseen. Colorists have changed across the series, so the palette varies by story.