What if you travel to another country and are suddenly sucked into an alternate world and you are given the chance to be another person altogether? What would you do? How far would you go? For Jonathan Webb, a boring book licensing agent, this could be a life-changing adventure.
Cover by Sean PhillipsBy Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Colors by Jacob Phillips
Who are you, really? Are you the things you do, or are you the person inside your mind? In Europe on a business trip, Jonathan Webb can’t sleep. Instead, he finds himself wandering the night in a strange foreign city with his new friend, the mysterious and violent Rainer, as his guide. Rainer shows Jonathan the hidden world of the night, a world without rules or limits. But when the fun turns dangerous, Jonathan may find himself trapped in the dark—the question is, what will he do to get home? NIGHT FEVER is a pulse-pounding Jekyll-and-Hyde noir thriller about a man facing the darkness inside himself.
At this point you already know the works of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, they are one of the most productive duos of the modern era of comics, with many books you know, “Sleeper,” “Fatale,” “The Fade Out,” and the modern classic series “Criminal.” In this new entry in their library, they experimented a little more, starting with the setting, now putting the story in France.
In the essay at the end of the book, Ed Brubaker gives a little bit of insight into the inspiration for this book, and it was surprisingly simple: they were tired, but not in a bad way, serialization is tiring, that’s why they have two ongoing titles currently active, and sometimes you need a break from having to come up with new stories for the same characters. Sometimes thinking about a different setting triggers a whole new idea.
This book coincided in time with the recent series of “One Bad Day” OGNs that DC comics just put out, in those books, that concept that Alan Moore, through the Joker, gave to the world of Batman, was explored further, giving each villain their corresponding “bad day.” Incidentally, “Night Fever” kind of works in the same way. What would happen if one night, your life changed? Are you going to be the same person that you were before? What’s hiding in yourself?
After a series of sleepless nights, triggered by reading a nightmare that he had younger, written in another person’s book, literary agent Jonathan Webb goes out to explore the city, he ends up meeting a man named Raniere, one of those individuals that the world seems to turn around them. What seems like an adventure with a new friend ends up turning more and more nightmarish, as the crimes that they do together stack up.
The main driver of the story is the narration, which is a more sparse than usual, leaving space for the action in the art and the moments of Webb as an observer. In an interview with Popverse, Brubaker explained how they used a four-tiered structure inspired by European comics, instead of their usual three-tiered structure, this made Brubaker re-think of how to do every page, every panel, and, therefore, how the story was being told.
The inspirations of the story are palpable in the book, from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the Jekyll and Hyde exploration of the man, the European-style spy, made famous by James Bond; there’s also a little bit of a B-Movie feel with how the aliens are presented. All of it merged into what we see in this comic.
There’s an interesting game of power between the two main characters, the protagonist Webb and his friend Rainer, one is a boring man stumbling into an adventure, seemingly harmless; the other is a tough, charismatic man that easily recurs to violence, he dominates the action and controls the situation. Ironically, although the two are shown to be able to kill, at the end the man who ends up “winning” is the serious and innocent-looking one; this is the main theme of the book, are men beasts waiting to be freed? Or are our violent reactions just a protection instinct for a bad day? After all, as Webb puts it, our brain finds a justification for our actions.
Continued belowIn the art department, you already know what to expect: top-notch quality, clear action sequences, and gorgeous renderings of cities, in this case a French town. As described in the same interview for Popverse, they wanted to format the book in the style of bandes dessinées, Brubaker was scared of changing the format that has been working for them lately, but Sean Phillips did inked his pages on a bigger format, as is the usual for European artists.
This translated to the pages into very detailed backgrounds, given that he was able to work on a bigger canvas. As explained in the afterword, Sean wanted an English or European setting for a book, and this enabled him to present a fresh and inspired take of the world that the characters live in. He also played more with the form, like the moment when the protagonist falls into darkness and into himself.
As is becoming customary, the star of the event was Jacob Phillips’ colors, this time he used a pallete with muted, soft blue and pink neon-like colors, that contrasted with the heavy blues and blacks of the French night, oh and also reds, lots of reds that highlighted moments of sin: the maze, the escape from police and more subtly, the deaths.
Jacob Phillip’s technique focuses in the subjective, reflected in blocks of colors that are especially useful to heighten the feverish feelings of the book, Jonathan Webb, the protagonist, works as an audience surrogate, so we as readers, get played by the colors, that mix what was real and what wasn’t, the coloring works as an unreliable narrator.
This time, we got the usual of what we can expect from a Brubaker/Phillips work: the corruption of Man, plot twists that reveal a deeper story, and a feeling of loneliness for the protagonist. Then, we get a little bit of spice to the formula, with the brief introduction of aliens (drug hallucinations?) to the story, at that point I knew that what Brubaker and Phillips wanted for this book was to have fun and explore topics that they don’t usually do, a kind of experimentation that might come in handy for future works.
This book is a one-and-done story like “Pulp,” and although we are more accustomed to the serialization of their books, from “Criminal” to “Reckless,” this was in fact a good challenge. The audience tend to expect an ongoing story with ever-growing stakes, some could argue that Brubaker and Phillips are on the very short list of authors who can still make a living with creator-owned long-form comics; and yet, as far as we know, “Night Fever” has the intention of being a single story.
At first reading, I felt that I missed something, and upon reflection, I realized that I was accustomed to reading about Ethan Reckless and Anna and their friendship, and knowing that I was going to get a new tale in some months, this time, this was not the case, the story ended and we won’t have more of it, but that doesn’t mean that it’s missing something, sometimes stories are short and just end, we don’t need to add more.
Even though I initially thought something was missing, “Night Fever” did deliver a nice, satisfying story, that played with the ambiguity of not knowing what was real, and put into question the morality of the main character, was this just a series of circumstances that changed him? Was this just one bad day? Or was there always something bad within Jonathan Webb, just lurking, waiting to be freed?
