Brubaker's noir world

You wouldn't notice Leo Patterson if you bumped into him on the street. But later, you might trace your missing wallet back to that anonymous bump.

Like a true criminal, Leo's goal is to be wallpaper. Nothing flashy. Don't deviate from a plan. Don't break the rules. Cut and run, to use a familiar phrase, if things start to go south.

You might not recognize Ed Brubaker if you ran into him on a Seattle sidewalk either, unless you're a hard-core fan of the prolific comic-book writer's hard-boiled work. Unlike his character, Leo, Brubaker's got a profile that's rising by the month, and it won't be long before civilians (read: non-geeks) can pick him out of a lineup.

Following a stint at DC Comics that included "Gotham Central" (an "NYPD Blue" take on a precinct of regular cops in a superhero world), a revamp of "Catwoman" and the outstanding "Sleeper" (about a tough double-agent with pain-conductor powers), Brubaker's been doing knockout work on flagship Marvel titles — "Daredevil," "Captain America" and "The Uncanny X-Men." This week, he parlays that juice into a fairly risky venture of his own: "Criminal."

The new monthly title (featuring art by Sean Phillips) is notable for being a straight crime story from Marvel, a company not known for venturing far beyond muscular dudes in tights; for being one of the few titles from its "Icon" imprint of creator-owned work by marquee talent; and for getting off to a smart, seedy start in its premiere issue.

"I wanted to do sort of the ultimate noir comic without being as over the top as something like 'Sin City' is," says Brubaker, 39. "I mean, noir is essentially over-the-top and cliché, but I like the idea of taking those clichés and those genre tropes and sort of twisting them around."

In "Criminal," Leo the pickpocket is also a master heist-planner who gets pulled into doing a job by crooked cops. He takes care of his smack-addicted, Alzheimer's-ridden mentor. And he's got a reputation around town: He's a coward.

Sitting in the book-crammed basement office of his Capitol Hill home, Brubaker explains, "It's more of an exploration of being a coward and of violence in the world, and through the story of this heist gone wrong, of exploring this person's reaction to the violence that's inside himself that he's kept bottled up all these years out of the need to be safe — and then what happens when he's pushed beyond the limit."

Brubaker's made his bones by infusing a darker, police-procedural element into mainstream comic books that's made them less preposterous to increasingly sophisticated/jaded readers — to his credit, even making the potentially cheesy and jingoistic Captain America a crackerjack espionage thriller.

"I think I have a fairly good eye for crime," Brubaker says.

And a past with a fair share of it. Much of it's chronicled in his semi-autobiographical 2001 graphic novel, "A Complete Lowlife" (Top Shelf, $12.95). Among some of his readers, Brubaker says, "there's a mystique around the fact that I actually in my teens and early 20s lived kind of a shady life, that I was involved in drugs and crime." While he's not anxious to get into a lot of details at this late date, he says, "I'm not ashamed of having survived it. I've spent some time in the felony tank, let's put it that way. That really straightened me out, as far as scared straight goes, like not sleeping while you're in a downtown San Diego county jail with, like, 50 other guys in the tank, getting legal advice from a guy who's covered in blood from getting beaten by police. That was lovely."

Adding to said crooked mystique is that Brubaker's a relatively large 6 feet, 200 or so pounds. There's also the now-infamous event some years back in which he arm-wrestled about 50 "Sleeper" fans at a book-signing — the losers having to buy a copy and the eight winners getting theirs for free.

But in fact, Brubaker's an affable guy far removed from his brutal characters, with an infectiously ear-splitting laugh and a soft spot for his stubby-legged wirehaired dachshund, Watson, and his codependent cat, Cromwell.

"Basically, you just grow up at some point," he says. He married his wife, Melanie, in 2000, bonding over their love of pop culture and science fiction, he says. A moment of crystallization occurred when Mel took his side in an argument with a friend over whether "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" was a lousy movie. (They maintain only the first ape flick is any good.)

His crimes and misdemeanors on the comic page in recent years have included messing with some long-established characters — for instance stirring up "Captain America" readers by bringing back Cap's long-dead young partner, Bucky, as a brainwashed Russian cyborg assassin called "The Winter Soldier."

"I do have a reputation for coming in and doing shocking things and shaking things up," he admits.

The Cap he always liked is a "sort of morose espionage comic, where it's this really depressed man out of time who's fighting against the hordes of HYDRA, and it's somewhere in between a superhero comic and James Bond or something, but with this dark, noir way of telling the story."

When Brubaker took the reins of blind hero "Daredevil" a few months ago, he made the already-gritty comic downright ferocious — by putting altar ego Matt Murdock in prison and daring to keep him out of costume for several issues.

"I thought what you do is, you up the stakes. You take that car that he's (metaphorically) flipped over and flip it over a couple more times, basically. What if instead of just Matt having this problem with people knowing he's Daredevil — he's been outed by the tabloids, the government's after him for being a vigilante — I thought the worst thing that could happen is he gets thrown into prison with The Kingpin and Bullseye and all these people."

He shook up the X-Men by adding a sinister backstory to the current group's decades-old origin in "Deadly Genesis."

"My feeling is, I try to be true to the spirit of the early days of Marvel when I work on these books," Brubaker says. "Which is, for the first 10 or 15 years, you just had no idea what the status quo of these books really was going to be. They would feel like they had a status quo, but if The Thing quit the Fantastic Four, you'd feel like, yeah, eventually The Thing's going to come back, but he could be gone for years. You never knew what they were going to do in those books."

Sometimes the shake-ups freak readers out, but it needs to be done, he says. "It's better to get a reaction from people. It's better to do the kind of stories that you'd actually like to read yourself than to just worry too much and be too precious about the properties. What's interesting about the Marvel characters is that they were created to be broken."

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com