“Where The Body Was”: A Delightful Ensemble Murder Mystery

First Impressions

I was a bit worried when I opened up the book and it started with a double-page map of the neighborhood where the story takes place, followed by a 9-panel grid filled with the major characters. I didn’t want to do homework before I started reading the book.

Thankfully, I needn’t have been worried.

“Where the Body Was” is a darkly humorous and entertaining suburban crime tale with multiple stories weaving through each other, leading to a big blow-out finale that doesn’t answer the story’s major questions at all.

Until it does.

The story is strong and clearly told, but how we get there is even better. This book is made by two creators who are comfortable enough with their skills to take a risk with a story structure like this. It’s a style that suits an ensemble piece beautifully.

I’m sure Brubaker has a notebook filled with plot details and maybe an Excel spreadsheet to keep everything straight for which character was where, with who, and when. But I never thought about it when I read the book. His not-entirely-linear storytelling technique here always gives the reader just enough information to keep up. The question marks are perfect little teases, not points of confusion that you’ll figure out on a second reading.

This book is a very good read, and a much easier one than I first feared. (That’s on me, not the creators. I’m scatterbrained and forget details way too easily.)

No Credits Would Be a Crime

Who’s In It?

What I feared might be homework is, instead, a hint of what’s to come. You’ll get a feel for the book and the people in it before starting.

It’s not just a page-filler, either. Brubaker and Phillips have some fun with the page and give more information than you might have initially realized.

The short character descriptions combined with the portraits by Phillips give you an immediate insight into who they are, or who they’re going to be. As a bonus, none of them are as simple as their labels. The story adds so much more to them. There’s always a reason for why every character in this book acts the way they do. It’s not just because they’re filling an archetype.

Tommy doesn’t look like your typical JD. He looks shy and awkward. Karina is all attitude and he gesture quickly shows that. Palmer looks like a Brubaker/Phillips character, straight out of central casting in “Criminal.”

“Neglected Wife” immediately tells you where her story is going, particularly combined with that smirk on her face. The fact that she’s looking off in the direction of her husband’s portrait strengthens that relationship. If you’re just reading over this page quickly, you might not look carefully at their last names to know they’re husband and wife, but her glance will guide you there.

Jack Foster kind of looks like an 80s private investigator (shades of Magnum P.I.?), especially the kind that doesn’t see what’s going on around him because he’s looking away from everyone.

OK, that last one is a bit of a reach, but it does kind of fit the story.

I’ll leave the last tier of characters as an exercise for the reader. Let’s skip ahead to the story:

What the Story Is

There’s a quote about the book right there on the cover calling it a “puzzle box.” I wish I had thought of that description first, because it’s fitting.

Picture a mid-80s suburban neighborhood somewhere in California. It was an up-and-coming area in the post-World War II era, and now hosts a colorful range of characters. They’re a mix of characters that might at first seem familiar, but will twist into something else.

The story is about someone who shows up dead in the neighborhood, but the book keeps you guessing for a long time as to who it might be. There’s a potential for any of the characters to wind up dead, and any of the others to be the perpetrator. It’s a fun ride getting there.

You have the middle-aged curvy woman who’s having an affair with the “man with a badge” next door, under the nose of the neighbor who is outside most of the time listening in on what’s going on. There’s the 11-year-old girl who wants to be a superhero patrolling the neighborhood who sees more than any of the adults ever do. The bulk of the action happens at the semi-abandoned house at the end of the street, where the original owner has passed and a mix of drugs and theft arrive in her wake.

Plus: the homeless guy, the psychiatrist, and the private detective. (Can someone rewrite the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island” for this cast?) It’s a wonderful mix of folks who are all involved in the main story to various degrees.

There are two who get the most face time in the book. The first is the police officer having an affair. He’s a bit of a bully whose lies are destined to trip him up and cause big trouble.

The other is the young man at the end of the street in the middle of a love triangle of sorts, where the “other” man is every other guy in the world. He stands by her while she runs off with the drummer at their favorite dive bar after the gig. As with everything else in this book, his reactions to this are well written and her actions are well-reasoned.

I’m not sure how much more I could say without spoilers, but what I can talk about is the impressive way the story is formatted.

Story Formatting

It’s the style that this story is told in that makes it stand out. The book jumps in time all over the place. While most of the story is set along a few days in 1984, there are also some flashbacks and, more interestingly, some flash forwards to the characters many years later.

The text on the page easily skips between omniscient narrator to the character narrating the story from three decades later, looking directly at the reader. If you’ve seen “The Big Short” or “I, Tonya,” you’ve seen this kind of format work before. It’s not “The Office” where it’s used for comedic effect with lots of mugging for the camera. It’s not a fake documentary with questions coming from off-camera.

It’s a character being aware of the reader and speaking directly to the fourth wall, with a narrator responding in a way that you’re not sure they can hear, but it doesn’t matter. Don’t overthink this. Just enjoy it.

This book violates the strictest definition of “Show, Don’t Tell.” Rules are meant to be broken, of course, and they can be broken well. This is one of those cases. There are plenty of scenes where characters spell out exactly what they did just before the art shows it to you.

The book delights in being slightly self-referential. The first panel in the book shows the house at the center of the story with the title “It All Started at the Boarding House”. We’ll get to those titles next, because they’re a particular delight.

All of this is achievable based on the strength of Phillips’ illustrations and Brubaker’s script. The two things that sell it are the dialogue and the structure.

First, the prose in this book is smooth. You won’t be tripping over lines. There’s no attempt to create wacky accents or verbal tics to separate characters. Everything works in context, not ornamentation. Phillips knows how to tell the story, also. There’s never any doubt as to who is speaking, and panels are always laid out well to carry that through.)

Second, Phillips (along with his colorist son, Jacob) do a good job in changing visuals with the different time frames in the book. Color is important to that, but so are shifting fashions when we get to the bigger (less frequent) time jumps ahead. And if you aren’t sure what time frame the story is currently in, the events on the page make it pretty obvious.

There’s a transition early in the book from Toni and Palmer having their affair back to where it all started. It’s a great example of where the color scheme on the page jumps to indicate a time change, along with the obvious actions of the characters only making sense if this was where things started.

The book doesn’t make you work hard to remember all the details, but it does reward a reader who is paying attention to what’s happening on the page, and not just skimming through the book.

Quick tangent time: Seriously, I think a lot of the people online who complain that something was confusing or didn’t make sense are all too often reading a book while distracted by something else, or racing through a book without paying attention to it. Comics are words AND pictures. Even the most veteran comics reader needs a gentle nudge occasionally to pay attention to both and how they interact to get the most of a story.

Yes, that does sometime include me.

One Random Thing About Chapter Titles

The book also has chapter breaks, and those always come back with a chapter title. There are, also, scene titles inside of those chapters from time to time.

I wish more writers would use those. Brubaker uses them in a variety of ways, from simple descriptions to light hearted counterpoints to the story, to little scene setters. It’s not used as comedically as Christopher Priest used them in Black Panther, but it does add character to the book and I love them.

I already mentioned the first title earliest, but I also like the one later in the book when the body is found. The panel includes the title “The Dead Man on the Sidewalk”. The drawing is of a dead man laying on the sidewalk. I laughed at how delightfully and purposefully on the nose it was.

Book Formatting

I wanted to review this book to go back to an article I wrote in 2020. The model of comics production that Ed Brubaker and Shawn Phillips are using with this book and their “Reckless” series, et. al., is about the closest thing we have in North America to someone emulating the Franco-Belgian model. They release complete graphic novels at a regular cadence without first serializing them.

They do standalone books like this one, series with a lead character like “Reckless”, and series in a consistent world with recurring characters like “Criminal.”

They produce strong work regularly for an ever-growing and ever-more-passionate audience. They’re building a library of their own books.

Plus, they own the IP and can do whatever they like with it..

If you ask me, this is what the future of comics should look like. It is already turning out to be, but Marvel and DC will be the absolute last to disrupt their own model to adopt a new one.

Except this book is almost 150 pages, so it goes a little past your typical Franco-Belgian album. However, it’s on smaller pages with fewer panels, so the total art gap isn’t as great as you might think.

Honestly, it took me somewhere around 30 – 45 minutes to read the whole thing, which is about how long it takes to read an “Asterix” volume, so it fits pretty closely.

Recommended?

Yes! Absolutely! This is a complete, self-contained story told in an interesting way that never gets bogged down in details or plot mechanics. For a book that’s about a murder, there’s relatively little in it that would constitute a murder mystery. You’ll fall for the characters and get lost in the book’s style and storytelling. It’s a very good, satisfying and surprising.