Daniela Marino

Essay Assignment # 2
Comic Books and Graphic Novels
Criminal: Volume 2, Bad night
Prof. Kuskin
Ed Brubaker (words) and Sean Phillips

All we need is. Closure!

One should never leave things unsaid or undone. I need closure! Thats what
we hear all the time in movies. That feeling of leaving something unfinished can
consume you from inside out nights and nights in a roll. What have I done wrong? How
can I change? How can I go on? It seems that this need for a closure is what moves
many of us on and it is not different for Jacob in his Bad Night of Criminal volume 2.
Although we only have a page to analyze, this one page is all it takes for us to
get some ideas that I believe are found in the whole serie of Criminal. In this three by
three grid page with a strong noir atmosphere we find Jacob alone in his apartment. He
is a cartoonist, whose strips can be seen in the local newspaper every day. He has
deadlines and he doesnt seem to care. Why?
The telephone rings. Its his editor. He leaves a message because Jacob wouldnt
answer What is that in his life or in his past that makes him look as he has a burden to
carry? He doesnt seem happy, even if we think that he probably loves what he does, his
apartment is dark as it is a reflection of his life.
Maybe we could find some hints about his personality by paying close attention
to his cartoon. His name is Frank Kafka and he is a private detective. Would be Kafka

his alter ego? After all, his name itself is an allusion to the popular Czech writer who
told the strange story of a man who is transformed in a cockroach in his book The
Metamorphosis. A superficial analyze of it would tell us he is a man who looks for a
change, but at the same time, he is stuck to an event in his past that doesnt allow him to
move on and yet, he has developed a method to do so:
I try to always leave a strip in progress, but close to
being done That way, the next day you have something to
start right in on because that last panel calls out to you like
an unfinished sentence. (Brubaker, Criminal: volume 2. P. 3)

It is a common sense to think that a work tells us more about the writer than any
biography and if we consider so, what led Ed Brubaker to create a comic inside a comic
would be to give us some perspective about Jacob using a very original way to make us
understand the protagonists personality, but even more than that, what Jacob thinks
about his methods is exactly what calls our attention to the way he feels.
By taking a look at the fourth panel, we recall one of the lectures of professor
Kuskin telling us that one of the reasons why comics can be so appealing is because
most of times they also tell us about ourselves, so by letting us know about his method
which is actually Archie Lewis he makes us think about our search for meaning and
continuation in our own lives and as in life, this page leaves us with more question than
answers, but still, it is exactly what a noir comic is supposed to do.
In order to find some meaning or to make any guesses we need to allow
ourselves to sink into each panel and feel all the tension of this thriller-like story: from
the first panel to the fourth Jacob is really concentrated in what he is doing even when
interrupted by the phone and then, on the fifth he goes away leaving the clock on the
sixth panel to remind the reader that it is time to go, but together with the pictures we

have his lines explaining why he always leaves something undone, so then he has
something to hold on to, as we would like to believe we could do in life. Somehow, it is
like his life depends on that sequence of repetitive events and so does ours. He feels safe
that way why? What skeletons is he hiding in his closet?
Although we may never know the answer for those questions, what we do know
is that this need of closure is something relevant for all of us and by leaving something
behind we can wake up the next day with a purpose. This need is what makes us hope
for something better every day and maybe that is exactly what Jacob longs the most:
some closure.
You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the
world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with
your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one
suffering you could avoid.
Franz Kafka