I was never a fan of Ed Brubaker. Not because I didn’t think he was good. I just never read anything by him until now. When he was doing his famous Captain America run, I wasn’t even reading comics at the time. So I didn’t come into The Knives: A Criminal Book (sponsored link) with any expectations. I just picked it up on a whim, because I guess I’m the crime comic guy.

I loved it.

What grabbed me right away was how the story connected separate crimes from across the country through the relationships between the main characters. You start thinking you’re reading a few unrelated criminal tales, and before you know it, Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips are quietly stitching them together in ways that make total sense. Every thread feels earned, every connection natural. It’s the kind of crime storytelling that rewards paying attention.

Then I found out there were multiple books that came before this one. So I started reading those too. And that’s when I realized The Knives is even better than I thought. The main characters are callbacks to earlier entries in the Criminal series; some of them only mentioned or briefly seen in passing before. It adds a whole extra layer to the story. You start seeing how all these lives, crimes, and mistakes bleed into one another over time.

It’s the kind of long-form, interconnected storytelling that comics rarely get right. Brubaker and Phillips pull it off like they’ve been doing it forever, because they have.

If, like me, you’ve somehow gone this long without diving into Brubaker’s world, The Knives is a great place to start. Just be prepared to fall down the rabbit hole once you realize how deep this world really goes.