There are a lot of comics out there, but some just stand out head and shoulders above the pack. With “Don’t Miss This” we want to spotlight those series we think need to be on your pull list. This week, we look at “Kill Or Be Killed,” another collaboration between Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser.
Who Is This By?
“Kill Or Be Killed” is produced by Ed Brubaker with illustrator Sean Philips and colorist Elizabeth Breitweiser.
What’s It All About?
“Kill Or Be Killed” is a tale as old as time. An alienated white male, Dylan Cross, feels disconnected from the material and physical world and begins to violently reassert himself. When self-destruction doesn’t go his way, he graduates to acts of vigilantism in ski mask not to dissimilar Dave Lizewski’s, stalking New York City for bad people to kill. Is he doing these toxic violent acts as part of a Faustian pact for a second chance at life? Is it more that he finds himself drawn into the thrilling, untenable cycle of death? All that is certain is that he has to drop a body a month.
It’s kill, or be killed.
The pithy side of me wants to gesture back at those credits: Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, Elizabeth Breitweiser, and call it a day. This is a trio that is responsible of a slew of excellent comics from issues of Brubaker’s run on “Captain America,” to their creator owned works like “Fatale” and “The Fade Out.” They have a track record of quality work. In the case of “Killed,” it isn’t some inherent quality born of this trio’s collaboration but how “Killed” is positioned within their collective works that makes it stand out. Their works are often exercises in criminal or hard boiled narratives. With its emphasis on psychology, alienation (both socially and by the reader), and modern life, “Kill or Be Killed” takes things in more of a neo-noir direction as Dylan and the reader are forced to question their own sanity.
Artistically for this book, Sean Phillips seems influenced by grungy 1970s cinematographers like Kent L. Wakeford, László Kovács, and Arthur Ornitz. Pages are bathed in heavy and encroaching darkness that help to emphasize the palette Elizabeth Breitweiser brings. Compositionally, Phillips does an excellent job of depicting the disconnect with the New York crowd. He’ll place Dylan or Kira in the middle of it and let everything else fade away into anonymity. He’ll make the separation between people in a subway car feel like 20 feet from the characters. All build to a moment between the two where there is no one around and the background noise of the world seems to disappear. There are plenty of images that would feel right at home if you replaced Dylan Cross with Paul Kersey as they look for the bad people to kill. This mode gives character moments time to breathe and contrast with the violent, bloody, fast, and uncompromising, action.
Elizabeth Breitweiser gives things a modern feel with her colors but that also adds to the detached, alienating feeling in this book. How these colors are applied is so surgical and precise, making for a paradoxically clean yet grungy appearance. The colors she brings to the table are largely muted secondary and tertiary. This palette makes for a world that just feels slightly off, providing more ammo to the unsettling feeling the book evokes.
Combined Phillips and Breitweiser make a beautiful book. Their compositions and structure all work in tandem to create something that feels haunted.
Brubaker’s running narration for Dylan Cross is an interesting shift for him. Brubaker has written sad sack and hard boiled types before. In those cases the narration was generally meant to endear them to the reader or make them seem cool. The narration by Dylan Cross doesn’t really do much in terms of endearing them to the reader. He’s kind of whiny, you’re never really supposed to feel “sorry” for him as his actions slowly cause an accelerating spiral out of control. That spiral gives the book an elliptical structure as Dylan goes back and forth through time. Brubaker’s narration makes for an interesting contrast between word and picture. Visually as the ski masked vigilante, Phillips and Breitweiser render him as cool killer, even if the action is messy. The interiority of the words puncture that cool exterior and reveal someone getting by the skin of their teeth.
Continued below“Kill or Be Killed” is an interesting new addition to this trio’s oeuvre. It is stylistically similar to their past works but also very different as this book is as much a measured character study in alienation as it is an action thriller.
How Can You Read It?
The first 15 issues of “Kill or be Killed” have been collected into three trade paperbacks, a fourth one is due out August 15, 2018. Issue #20 is released June 27, 2018.
