Posted in: Comics, Image | Tagged: ed brubaker, ethan reckless, graphic novel, image comics, reckless, sean phillips

Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips' Reckless OGN Is Not Beginning a Trilogy

Ed Brubaker posted the news to his newsletter, which saves me from cutting and pasting it from The Hollywood Reporter. We teased this was coming earlier, now it is all official – Reckless from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips – and the beginning of something.

This is our next project, a series of graphic novels, each one a fully self-contained story, and we're releasing three of them over the next year. The books are much longer than our recent OGNs – the first book in the series is 144 pages, actually, so twice as long as PULP and JUNKIES.

RECKLESS launches in mid-December in hardback from Image, and book 2 is scheduled for April 2021. And I repeat, each of these books is a completely standalone graphic novel. There is no "to be continued" at the end of the book.

But each will feature the same character.

Meet Ethan Reckless: Your trouble is his business, for a price.

A former student radical, with the scars to prove it, Ethan is one part repo man, one part private eye, and one part wrecking ball. But when a fugitive from his Weather Underground days reaches out for help, Ethan will have to face the only thing he really fears… his own past.

Which is not a common thing these days:

Strangely, the 'series character' genre, the pulp paperback hero, has never been a big thing in comics – other than Darwyn Cooke's PARKER books, which adapted paperbacks from the 60s. And when rereading those  recently, it hit me that there was nothing else like them on the market anymore, character-focused pulp graphic novels.

There have certainly been thriller and mystery comics, and recurring detective characters –  my friend Greg Rucka's STUMPTOWN (now seen on TV) is a great example of how to serialize a private eye story then put it out as a book. But one of the things I loved most about those PARKER books was that they were graphic novels, there was no other way to buy them – they came out just like the novels they were based on did. Yet somehow, in a world where graphic novels are becoming more and more common, no one in the US comics market (that I know of at least) has taken a swing at an original book series like that.

So we decided to… And just to be crazy, we're putting three of them out in one year, to really put the series on the map.

But its not just three of them, as some have reported this as a trilogy.

We are deep into this book already, and I've got outlines for at least five more of them.

So that's eight? At least?

This series of books could go on for a while, the three books part of the announcement was to say – we're serious about this commitment, we're putting out the first three books in the series over one year, so you don't have to wait long to get the next book.

At this time, I have no idea how many graphic novels beyond the first three that this series will end up running. But it's not a trilogy, and again, there's no 'to be continued' at the end of these books.

More to come…

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