The annoying thing about downer endings is that even if you see them coming, if the writer manages to make you care enough about his characters, you don’t want them to happen. And the first story arc of Ed Brubaker’s Criminal series fully succeeds with getting you down. A diamond theft gone wrong ends with all of the characters dead or dieing and the only thing left is to wonder whether Leo is really dead or pulled a Layer Cake ending. Though I doubt the later, from what I’ve heard about the series in general.
Brubakers delivers complex, believable character that get under your skin and whose death is not something you want to see. Leo, the main character, is a burglar/master thief who follows a set of fixed rules, that if followed by the letter, should protect him from the various ills of his job, like prison or death. Also, he has the reputation of being a coward, which is both true but completely wrong on what he’s a coward about. As expected, once he gets emotionally involved with one of his partners in the job that is gone from bad to worse, he abandons those rules and pays the price, though not before the damsel in distress gets stuffed into the fridge.
Criminal owes much of its influences to noir and crime fiction in general and while I do likes those genres, I’m not so hot about the most pernicious elements that are deeply embedded in those genres. Brubaker isn’t even trying to subvert the tropes here, just writing the stuff on a very high level. So, while Greta feels more rounded and complex as a character, she still ends up dead and being the motivation for Leo to go after the others. Not exactly evolution, just decades old storytelling improved.
The Entropy Pump 