Felon

Written by Greg Rucka
Illustrated by Matthew Clark
Color & BW, Comics Format, Miniseries
Top Cow/Image Comics, 2001

Greg Rucka (Whiteout, Queen & Country) and Matthew Clark's Felon was a very promising crime series that met a premature demise.

In the four issues published by Top Cow through Image Comics, we meet Cassiday, the titular Felon, an attractive young woman just out of prison. Over the course of the first three issues, she hunts down the men who were her partners on the last job she pulled, looking for her share of the stolen money. But the money's gone, so she instead teams up with them to pull off a new heist. As we know – in crime fiction, anyway – these things always end badly, and there's plenty of betrayal and bloodletting before Cassiday's got everything squared. In Issue #4, we are introduced to FBI agent Freeh – another attractive young woman – who happens to be the Fed who put the Felon behind bars. She knows in her gut that Cassiday's back on the job and is determined to bring her in again... even if it costs her everything, including her marriage.

Rucka does a solid Richard Stark-styled story here, with two more strong, female characters along the lines of Queen & Country's Tara Chace and Whiteout's Carrie Stetko. Cassiday and Freeh are tough and beautiful, hunters both, each willing to put it all on the line to accomplish their goals. The dialogue is appropriately hardboiled, the plot logical and expertly paced.

Matthew Clark's art is very good, even if he works in a style that's not usually to my taste – a bit too slick, clean and commercial. What we used to call "Image-style." Nonetheless, he puts in the work, and makes a real effort to give the story some grittiness and some appropriate atmosphere. The fourth issue is printed in B&W and that helps with the tone somewhat.

I really enjoy Felon, but it's clearly incomplete, with Agent Freeh just starting out on her Javert-styled hunt for her prey as the series ends. As a first story arc, it works great, but as a self-contained miniseries, it's unsatisfying.

Of course – it wasn't intended to be self-contained miniseries at all, although I didn't know it at the time. Upon re-reading the series for this review, I was once again struck at the odd finale. Wondering at the abrupt ending, I e-mailed Greg Rucka himself and asked him what happened.

Here’s his response:

Felon... sigh... this is the story that will never end.... As originally conceived (and, for the record, as promised to us by Top Cow), it was to be a 25 issue series. We'd follow the Felon as she went about her Parker-esque-escapades, and every so often we'd check in with Agent Freeh (Christ, it was so long ago, I can't even remember if that was her name), and watch as her life deteriorated as she became more and more obsessed with catching the Felon. So that was the plan.

Then Matthew Clark and I walked into the Things from Another World comic book store on Sandy Blvd, in Portland, and picked up Previews, and saw that we were being solicited as a -- I think -- six issue mini. And that was the first we heard of it. As work continued on the series, Top Cow made it plain that the numbers weren't what they wanted. The accounting -- according to them -- was a wash. This may have been due, in no small part, to the fact that the colorist on the book was making more than Matthew and I combined. A series of conversations ensued, and after a war of attrition, Matthew and I decided to call it with 4 issues. The black-and-white choice (on #4) was to save money.

It remains, to this day, one of the single worst experiences of my comic book writing career, top to bottom. I will never work with Top Cow again. There isn't enough money. The people we dealt with were either dishonest, incompetent, or unforgivably arrogant. A coda to this – part of what Top Cow wanted was never a comic; they wanted a property they could sell media rights to. They did, in fact, sell Felon as a MOW concept. I actually saw a script. It's a good thing no one else was subjected to it. A second coda – when everything washed out, Matthew and I got the films back, and it is possible that one day we will revisit the subject matter, and perhaps tell the story we set out to tell. Just as likely it will never happen. Not a good experience. At all.

Greg

Thanks, Greg. I'm as interested in the behind-the-scenes stories of these books as I am the stories within their pages. I appreciate you sharing this.

Incomplete as it is, I still recommend hunting this series down. The first three issues stand alone fairly well, and make a solid little caper tale.

Five out of Six Bullets.