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The award-winning comic book creative team of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are back to bring more pulpy, hardboiled thrills for down-on-his-luck protagonist Ethan Reckless in Destroy All Monsters. The graphic novel is the third in the crime noir Reckless series launched through Image Comics. In Destroy All Monsters, Ethan finds himself quickly becoming isolated from others as threats converge at home. He also finds that his private investigation pursuits are about to welcome even more danger into his life.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Brubaker discussed putting Ethan through the gauntlet in this new yarn. Brubaker shared how the Reckless series originated from an enormously personal place for him and reflected on how his celebrated partnership with Phillips has evolved over the years. Also included with this interview are preview pages from Destroy All Monsters, penciled, inked, and lettered by Sean Phillips and colored by Jacob Phillips.
The stakes are higher than ever for Ethan when we see him again in this story while his personal relationships are strained. How is it especially putting Ethan through the wringer this time out?
Ed Brubaker: Well, as you can see from the opening chapter teaser, Ethan is in bad shape here. He’s feeling his age and his movie theater home is on fire. The rest of the book is the story of how we got to that point, and yeah, Ethan is really being pulled through the wringer. He’s at this point where he’s been doing this sort of trouble-making job long enough that he’s in a rut, and has started to make mistakes, and in Destroy we get to see exactly what kind and what the repercussions are.
We see the origins of Ethan and Anna’s friendship this time out. Why was now the perfect time to explore that shared history?
I think questions about the timing of things misunderstand how creativity works, at least for me. I just write these characters’ stories as they come to me. Each book, while standing on its own, flows from the ones before it. I only think of the characters and the story that we’re are telling with them as I write. I love writing Ethan and his assistant Anna, and we’ve seen a bit of their dynamic and their friendship/working relationship in the first two books, so their backstory just came to the forefront this time.
While a lot of your work comes from a personal place, there’s something more pronounced about it with Ethan, in particular his love of cinema. What was it you wanted to do in highlighting this connection, including Ethan’s base of operations being an old movie theater?
Ethan’s family history is based on mine more than anything I’ve ever written, actually. He’s much older than I am, but growing up a Navy brat and living all over the world, having a dad that was a Commander in Naval Intelligence, that’s all my history, so writing a character like Ethan finally gave me a place to talk about that kind of vagabond life and what it does to you as a kid — how you always feel like an outsider.
The movie theater — The El Ricardo — he operates out of is more of a fantasy. Like every cool paperback, hero needs a fun base of operations. If I could own a movie theater and live out of it and not let anyone else in, I would totally do that. But it also gets to his isolation from the rest of humanity. He’d rather be in a cold theater with just one friend, watching an old movie, than anywhere else — except the ocean.
Between this and books like The Fade Out, what makes Los Angeles such a ripe location for noir?
Los Angeles is a city of dreamers. People come to try to make it big and usually end up not doing so. It’s also one of the largest cities in the world and has a big history of corruption and vice and crime and racial issues and everything else you’d want to find in a crime story. In many ways, the history of Los Angeles is a crime story, so where better to place a noir story?
In addition to working together for years and years, you and Sean Phillips have been leaning into longer-form storytelling lately, moving towards original graphic novels, including the Ethan Reckless series. How do you continue to grow together as collaborators, especially with this change in format and having Jacob on colors?
I think with me and Sean, we’re both just like sharks, constantly needing to move forward and try new things. We never get too set in our ways or too satisfied with whatever we’ve just done. All our work spins around crime, for the most part, but we always try to tell different kinds of stories within that genre and to really play with comics as a medium.
The switch to graphic novels has been a big hit for us. I personally love having the extra room to let the scenes come to life a bit more and being able to play around with structure more. Sean is always trying new things, even new inking techniques, and these books really give him an expansive canvas to play on. And, of course, Jake on the colors is just a dream. They’re recreating a lost period of LA history so well, it’s like a dream for me whenever I get the pages.
As rough as things can get for Ethan, there is some balance to the usual cynicism that comes with hardboiled protagonists. What do you think Ethan Reckless brings to the noir genre in particular?
Oh god, that’s not for me to say, is it?
What I’m trying to do with him is riff a bit on some of the paperback pulp hero tropes, but bring a more modern and realistic (at times at least) sensibility to them. He has too many over-the-top action scenes to be too real, but that’s part of the fun. Alongside that, I think there’s a real exploration of that kind of life and the passing of time. The books are written from the present time, looking back at the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, so far, and comparing those hard times to the times we’re stuck in now. Ethan saw it all coming, so even though he’s a nihilist in many ways, he decided to try to help people get through life on this doomed planet (in his view).
I know you’ve talked about this in the past but the subject of Big 2 publisher-linked studios not paying the creators that directly inspired their big-budget films has come up in the news again. I was just wondering if you wanted to offer a statement towards that renewed discourse.
I think it’s great that people are talking about it more, and that more behind-the-scenes things have come out in public. I hope it has some effect on the way creators are treated when their work is adapted into these huge movies or TV shows, but so far it just seems like more and more creators and journalists are speaking out about it. People talk online about how unfair it is and then move on to the next story a few days later.
I don’t see any changes happening yet. I’ve actually gotten a fair amount of hate mail from fans saying that I’m an asshole for “constantly” complaining about it, even when these articles are quoting stuff I said in April. So I don’t have much hope that it’s going to be rectified anytime soon or ever. As always, there’s a long line of people who would be more than happy to write these characters and have their work turned into movies and get nothing for it. That’s how the system works, really.
Written by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Sean Phillips, Destroy All Monsters: A Reckless Book is on sale now from Image Comics.
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