She’s the one with the purple hair and chunky glasses - not the sort of cover model you’d see in the original pulps. “Oh, she’s my favorite character I’ve ever drawn,” he told Brubaker. Brubaker was nervous about the switch - until he talked to Phillips, who reassured him.

But in the most recent installment, April’s “ The Ghost in You,” Anna takes center stage in a story all her own, solving a mystery - in a Black Flag T-shirt no less - while Ethan works on a case out of town. Over the course of the first three Reckless books, Ethan and Anna’s relationship deepens as they exact extrajudicial payback upon a host of villains. When he’s not chasing down machete-wielding drug dealers or solving the mystery of a sex cult with a Satanist twist, Ethan hangs out in a dilapidated movie theater called the El Ricardo, which, as Brubaker told me in a recent Zoom conversation, was “a tip of the hat to Lucy and Ricky.” The venue’s projectionist, a punk rocker named Anna whom Ethan caught spray-painting anarchy symbols on the theater entrance, does double duty as his assistant. Part detective, part hired thug, Ethan moves through the world with ruthless efficiency, solving problems for people at the end of their rope. during the early 1980s, the first novel in Brubaker and Phillips’ series features a former FBI agent whose cover as a ‘60s radical was blown in a bomb blast. “ Reckless,” released in December 2020, announced the arrival of a new old-school antihero: Ethan Reckless. They now adorn a slick new series of graphic novels (with some key updates) by the legendary team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

These images are no longer the sole province of vintage paperbacks from the heyday of pulp fiction.

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Friend of the Devil by Ed Brubaker