10 Best Ed Brubaker Comics Fans Must Read
7. Kill Or Be Killed
This multi Eisner Award nominated series marked the sixth collaboration between Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. It takes their familiar pulp noir style and applies it to the modern world in a way that is often uncomfortably familiar.
The plot concerns a teenage boy – Dylan – who attempts suicide. He is spared by a demon who allows him to live one extra month for every person he kills.
Despite the supernatural starting point of the story, Kill Or Be Killed is Brubaker examining the real world in which we live and following it to one possible, extreme outcome. Here he is commenting on the anger and helplessness he has observed in an entire generation of young people.
It is a modern vigilante comic told in the style of the pulp fiction that Brubaker and Phillips enjoy so much. A perfect conduit with which to shine a light on Brubaker’s view that he was living in a world on the edge of falling apart.
Some reviewers have even gone so far as to compare the lead character to pulp fiction mainstay The Shadow.
Phillips’ art is as on point as ever while Elizabeth Breitweiser’s colours only enhance the storytelling.