knife
Author: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Sean Phillips
Colorist: Jacob Phillips
Publisher: Image Comic
Publication date: August 2025
After the release of Houses of the Unholy, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips returned to the crime universe in the form of an Amazon crime TV series. Its adaptation is currently being filmed without a release date, but the pre-production and casting process has created almost a year of silence of radio silence from Brubaker and his newsletter. As the show began to take shape, the image finally revealed that it wasn’t the only thing the show was working on during this long, quiet stretch.
The knife follows three familiar faces of the Criminal Universe. Jacob Kurtz, creator of the “Frank Kafcapie” comic strip. Angie dates back to the first detective arc, “co-sick” and is raised by an Underto bartender. And Tracy Lawless, who previously ran for the Hyde family’s criminal organization, for his father Teague and his brother Ricky. Of these three characters, Knife focuses primarily on Jacob and Angie. This is because the book alternates between two very different but convergent storytelling chapters. Like a cruel summer, here is more structural ambitions to be a unique epic that sets the next era of crime and revives the familiar themes defined by your mistakes and the history of your family.
The half of this book, the part that serves as a Hollywood confession and satirizes Brubaker’s experience as a non-comic author, is serviceable and sometimes a good fun. But joy is short-lived as we abandoned the experiment in their last few books, and preferring the same thing to abandon the experiment. What works about knives is something that has always been working with criminals, and it’s equally not surprising that it doesn’t work in this saga or this duo.
At its best, the knife has a sense of self-awareness about his company. Returning to what we thought was finished, seeing it take a new life, feel yourself from the moment of real consequences as the power of the world around you moves you forward, not your own choice. In the first chapter, Jacob Kurtz is headed down the road to Hollywood to film the TV adaptation of “Frank Kafka, Pie.” Much of the plot that follows feels deeply inspired by the Sopranos episode “D-Girl.” There, Chris travels to Hollywood to help John Favreau make a mob movie. A heejink follows, a romantic encounter occurs, all washed away with the bitter aftertaste of nihilism and crushed dreams.
This opening is taken from Brubaker’s own experience of making it in Hollywood, writing for several television projects, and attempting to circumvent the adaptations of his and Sean Phillips’ works over the past 20 years. In these sections, the knife comes to life as an explanatory commentary on the entire criminal enterprise and the expectations of Brubaker/Philips’ work. Existential influences are thrown aside by executives and actors who don’t know Kafka. Their world’s enjoyment is reduced to the conventions of a stylistic genre, and the comic medium is treated like a more modest pitch deck, rather than a storyboard for adaptation.
One of my favorite bits in the entire book is when someone calls Jacob’s strip “graphic novels.” Everyone in Hollywood said that anyone who claims they’ve read a comic book they’re adapting to is lying. And it’s almost always possible to say it, as it’s not “comic”, “problem”, “trade”, “strip”, or actually something that’s suitable for the material, but rather a “comic book” or “graphic novel”. It’s a small thing, but once you realize it you can’t worry about it. That level of light missivels, its attention to detail, or lack thereof, to the medium, emanates from the Hollywood side of this story, leading to all the best elements of the knife.
Maintaining his work identity and getting caught up in elements of the sishfeans of the crime world, Jacob’s journey begins to form the backbone of powerful self-criticism in Brubaker and Phillips’s own comics. Often we hear cartoon writers complain about Hollywood life, the writer’s room, and pitches that don’t go anywhere, or pitches that are lit by green just because the plug is pulled in the last seconds. Still, they continue to return to the well with hope that something different will happen this time. Similarly, you hear stories where every time in page rates plummet, or the manga is a precarious living, or the predatory nature of the publisher. Still, people continue to try and make comics. Criminals are the stories of people in bad places who seem to never lose hope of escape to another, better world at the bottom. Some protagonists are always with fantasies and dreams of different lives that cause endless cycles of self-discovery, just as they are as cynical as some stories, and only end in failure. Transposing that frustration into the creative industry is quickly persuasive and gives the book a very different vibe early on.
Do you think the mob is at fault? Try going to Hollywood.
Certainly, there is a considerable precedent for this connection as well. The early history of Hollywood and comics, especially DC, is littered with stories of mob pro-study studios, creatively fighting, union restraining and organizing efforts. It’s an attractive connection, and often Brubaker’s subtext feels like text. Who do you want to find yourself locked up in a room: Dan, a man who steals all your hopes and dreams, or Brandon Hyde who might troll you and steal all your hopes and dreams? It makes little difference depending on whether you are Jacob or Angie.
If the entire book was simply this fascinating self-aware journey into the belly of a corporate beast, it could be one of the best crime stories ever. Unfortunately, it exchanges its savvy satire very quickly for a very common and tired crime story. Half of Angie’s alternating stories are most ripe for drama and proper emotional weight. However, the problem at the moment is that while reading about two different characters, storytelling does not allow much juxtaposition of style or structure. The entire knife is told in a third party, and there are similarities between the life Angie is looking for and the life Jacob has, but there is no attempt to base itself on a part of the story of the formal elements of the comic.
That makes sense, as Ed Brubaker says his inspiration lies in classic detective and adventure novels that accumulate in a massive narrative explosion using simpler narrative structures and prose. To his achievement, this style has worked for several years. But the question regarding how a knife is organized is to bring attention to the very structure, whether intentional or not. Open the story about storytelling and explicitly shift your perspective into chapters. However, I don’t feel that none of them are reflected in the prose. It’s a similar question of where your body is. At some point, you write yourself in a situation where your craft needs to match the material you are aiming for, or you are forced to change the material. Brubaker doesn’t have either and can keep the style the same, even if they don’t provide the story anymore.
Another problem is that the knife does not act as its own entity like all other crime books, but rather as a set-up for later criminals. It’s going to embody commercial compromises for content, treating the world and characters like a continuous content farm, and it’s very well distorted in the opening with more adventures. I love Jacob’s fight with Dan and the Hollywood car. But in the end, that’s exactly what happens to Jacob, Angie and Tracy. What is a knife, if not another crime comic? It doesn’t feel like a story told for its own reasons and ambitions. Instead, it is the criminals who become synergistic with more criminals. The Criminal Joy was that you can always start reading from anywhere, but the knife assumes a certain level of investment. There’s a message that even if you become blind and grow up like Jacob, Tracy and Angie, this book stops rather than ending, and succumbs to the very logic that you thought the book was being teased.
Sean Phillips completed the art of the rough tumble characters with Art Deco talent radiated from his line work and reinforced by Jacob Phillips’ moody colours. Stylistically, the knife is found in a home with the quality of the past works of Brubaker and Phillips in California noir, but this has also been praised as much as criticism. There’s nothing new here. There’s nothing inferior either. It’s something you’ve come to expect and is more or less a drop. One major positive in the latest phase of Brubaker and Phillips’ career is that Jacob Phillips brings out the best in Sean Phillips’ art. Sean Phillips is coloured into some of the best, but the quality and shared aesthetic sensibility of the father-son duo creates a much more consistent free style.
Knifes are often fascinating, weaving in interesting stories with familiar characters and archetypes. It’s a cartoon that smooths out at the end of a long week, and the kind Brubaker and Phillips have been excellent for years. But it’s not new either. And all opportunities for books to flirt with innovation will be ignored by their disadvantages. As much as criminals have enjoyed themselves over the years, it’s difficult for me to not read this story as an endorsement of defeat. If the goal of this comic partnership is a constant output, they certainly achieved it. But if the goal is to grow as an artist with new challenges and new ideas, Knife has abandoned it completely.
This month the knife is coming out via image comics
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