He focuses us in on the characters and the action, the driving forces of the plot. Sean Phillips pulls back on the details of a lot of his settings. It’s with this simple narrative distancing and omissions of backstory that Brubaker helps us to see the DNA of these characters. And Linh avoids talking about her past at all. It makes him feel disconnected from the now, dreaming of the past just like he’s doing in his own narration. Brubaker sets Reckless’ narrations in the future. But it turns out he’s wrong, she feels connected to where she lives. Reckless assumes a couple things about how she would have felt growing up in America. Linh, the woman Reckless meets in this chapter, is a Vietnamese immigrant. Ethan Reckless looks just like everybody else, but he isn’t even at home in his own skin, let alone his time or place. But beneath it all, whether you look like you’re from that place or not, it’s the closest thing you have to a home.īrubaker shows us both of these extremes in Friend of the Devil. Other times, you might live somewhere where you stick out like a sore thumb. But under the skin, you feel totally different. You look like them, you must be like them. Sometimes, people look at you and think you’re just the same as them. You can feel like you don’t have a home, because you’ve never been anywhere long enough to really connect to it. Growing up all over the world can make you feel all sorts of ways. He was a military brat, which meant he wasn’t in one place for very long. But his afterword in this graphic novel describes his upbringing as a little different from most people’s. Writingīrubaker didn’t have a home growing up. Writer Ed Brubaker, artist and letterer Sean Phillips, and colorist Jacob Phillips’ second installment in their Reckless series, Friend of the Devil, is as fantastic as their first.

Friend of the Devil by Ed Brubaker