Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are known for creating gritty and intelligent graphic novels that stand out in the genre. In "Night Fever" they have outdone themselves to create a stand alone story that works on multiple levels to engage and delight fans. This book focuses on an insomniac on a sale trip abroad in the midst of a mid-life crisis who is drawn into a series of strange and hallucinatory events. This book is recommended for fans of noir and those who can except that knowing the truth is not as important as knowing oneself.

Thanks to the NetGalley and the publisher, Image Comics, for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest feedback.

This is another hit from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and for Image Comics. Fatale remains my favorite of their collaborations and this had some similar vibes - the title is very apt! Set in the 70s, with an apropros color palette courtesy of colorist Jacob Phillips and an art style in homage to period comics, Brubaker tells the story of man who considers himself a failure of a writer for having gone to work in publishing... and then not written anything. And things snowball from there lol

"The thing is, you can be a success and a failure at the same time." (pg. 23)

That is the crux of Night Fever; the pull between real life and your dreams and goals. This hit me harder than I expected because, in my mid-30s now, I am going through this same existential realization. Even as the story starts to go off the rails in completely unexpected ways, it still felt relatable, like the fever dream of an alternate you. How much of what the protagonist experiences is real? Who knows!

I absolutely loved this.

Another rich and readable tale from Brubaker and Phillips. Dark, exciting, and everything we've come to expect from this fantastic team.

Night Fever is a disorienting and violent take on the midlife crisis. It's a novel that I think will resonate with a lot of men who grind away at jobs they don't mind, but don't love, as the years by.

Jonathan Webb has what others would call a perfect life, but he's not happy in it. He'll take any sort of excitement or change that comes along, even if it's dangerous. He travels to Paris for work regularly but no longer enjoys it. He can't sleep. He starts taking drugs and meets a stranger who encourages him to let loose his darker impulses. His life quickly spirals in a few short days.

The artwork by Sean Phillips is incredible in this novel, it's the best part of the book for me. It's very cinematic, with real depth to the shots. Almost every panel has detailed backgrounds that give a real sense of the world beyond the story being told. I read this book on my tablet but ended up buying a hardcover copy for the art. The colour is perfect too. Very noir.

Brubaker/Phillips are an automatic buy for me and have been for a while. This book is one of my favourites from them now, up there with Pulp and the Fade Out. Can't wait to see what they do next.

A pretty dark view into the world of a man who's at his midlife crisis and decides to go a direction that feels like he's reading one of the thriller mystery novels. But the situations a regular dude is placed in makes for some unexpected endings. I really enjoyed the end, as it wrapped up this dark tale in a very believable way on top of some excellent art as always from the main man Phillips. This team never fails to deliver the goods. It's probably closer to a 3.5 but I'll bump it up to a 4 for the ballsy ending.

Jonathan Webb is on a business trip to Paris for the publisher he works for. One night, battling insomnia, he finds himself trying to find a pharmacy to get something to knock him out, but all the pharmacies are closed. A fateful meeting with a stranger will change his life and unlock a side in him he didn't know existed.

I really enjoyed this book! The story was intriguing and the artwork is absolutely phenomenal. I loved the color palette that was used. I also liked the different tone of the story with the horror elements. Brubaker and Phillips are a great team and I love their work. I highly recommend this to anyone who loves noir with some horror mixed in.

My thanks to Image Comics, Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and NetGalley for gifting me a digital copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

This book is literally a fever dream on the page. The illustrations add to the chaos and whiplash that the story gives you as the reader. By the end of this story you will be questioning reality.

This graphic novel is thoroughly enjoyable for anyone who enjoys thrillers with horror elements. At times it is primal, visceral. At others, it speaks to the sort of deep questions that reveal themselves in the darkness. While it leaves some of these deep questions unanswered, perhaps the point was not the answer but the asking.

Beginning with the creative team, Brubaker and Phillips have been collaborating for years now and their creative synergy shows in this book. These two seem to be at the height of their powers, telling a story here that is seamless. The art is expressive and moody, reminiscent of some of the greatest noir storytelling. This is helped along particularly well by the work of Jacob Phillips on colors.

The story itself is about a man on a business trip who begins to question the meaning of his life. He travels to a place, does his job, goes home. Wash, rinse, repeat. But this trip is different. Suffering from insomnia he chooses to step outside of his normal routine and live a little. He quickly finds himself in some strange and intense places, and he links up with another individual who continues to lead him through his nightly wanderings.

As the story progresses, the main character takes on a new persona, becoming increasingly violent, increasingly promiscuous, increasingly dangerous until one fateful morning he wakes up to find that someone has been killed. His memories hazy and unreliable, he is not completely sure if it was him that did the killing.

In true thriller fashion we see a couple of interesting twists as the story barrels toward its conclusion. In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I will say that the twists were satisfying and added to the enjoyment of the story.

Night Fever is a graphic novel produced by some the greatest comic creators of this generation and represents years of collaborative work and it shows. The setting and tone of this book is a bit of a departure from previous collaborations between Brubaker and Phillips, but like their previous work, it remains an excellent read. I especially enjoyed sitting with the questions that were being asked and wondering even upon finishing the story if everything was what it seemed to be. Night Fever is a great book that I would recommend to anyone who enjoys a good graphic thriller.

This story explores what it means to be someone else and the consequences of living another life. It captures middle-age ennui of satisfaction and complacency and wrestles through a Weird insomniac noir world of violence, power, and sex.

"An amazing new original graphic novel from the bestselling creators of Pulp, Reckless, Criminal, and Kill or Be Killed. Who are you, really? Are you the things you do, or are you the person inside your mind? In Europe on a business trip, Jonathan Webb can't sleep. Instead, he finds himself wandering the night in a strange foreign city, with his new friend, the mysterious and violent Rainer as his guide. Rainer shows Jonathan the hidden world of the night, a world without rules or limits. But when the fun turns dangerous, Jonathan may find himself trapped in the dark...And the question is, what will he do to get home? Night Fever is a pulse-pounding noir thriller from grand masters Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. A Jekyll-and-Hyde story of a man facing the darkness inside himself, this riveting tour of the night is a must-have for all Brubaker and Phillips readers!"

I'm beyond excited for this, but I will point out that because of it I'm not getting a new Reckless installment and that makes me very sad.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher Image Comics for an advanced copy of this graphic novel that takes place in the City of Lights, featuring a man who decides to be someone else, and the consequences for not being who we are.

Sometimes even the best of lives are boring. A job one is good at, with travel, meeting new people, discussing books, that sounds great. However everything looks perfect from far away, living that perfect life could be exhausting. The kind of exhausting that drives a person from sleep, that makes one wander and do dumb things. Things that make sense at the time, things that take one back to a misspent youth, before mortgages, baseball games and talks about publishing, when life was a rush. Something to be grasped with both hands, not a burden that has to be carried to the grave. But thrills lead to spills, and possibly even kills, and that other life might be over before it has even begun. Night Fever is a graphic novel, as fever dream, written and illustrated by two creators at the top of their game, Ed Brubaker on words, Sean Phillips on art, with Jacob Phillips as colorist.

Jonathan Webb is so bored with his life that even sleep isn't an escape anymore. Webb works for a publisher selling the foreign rights to books, a job he has grown tired of, even as a new book starts to bother him. This combined with a lack of sleep and a sudden lapse of judgement in his job sends him out one night to the streets of Paris looking for a pharmacy and some drugs to calm him. Webb sees a couple walking with masks on their face and follows them to te catacombs where a mad party is going on. Webb fakes his way in claiming to be Griffin, a random name on a page. Webb is given chips to gamble,which he does well with,, drinks to sip, and lots of bizarre scenery to take in. Leaving he is attacked for his and rescued by man named Ranier who offers him a life at night that Webb is soon addicted to, and that's when things really start to turn.

A story that starts quiet and moves into high speed, with lots of chaos, action, violence, and confusion. Brubaker is very good at setting the scene, and the place and letting things rip. Webb is a fully developed character in that one can understand why he is bored, and yet like other people around him, can't understand as he really does have a good life. A skill that Brubaker has is making the characters talk about their occupations in such a way that again, they seem real. I have noticed this a few times while reading books by Brubaker and Phillips, the conversations sound like they were lifted from real publishing types, as here, real detectives in other books, or killers. No wasted words, everything fits in the story. The art is really good. The afterword mention that Phillips asked for a European based story, and the art reflects the city of Paris and the era. The cars, the planes, the catacombs, even the hotel rooms, all look real and lived in. The characters are all distinctive and rendered well. Kudos also to Jacob Phillips for the coloring, which make the story really pop in a few places.

A great story, not just a crime story as would be expected from these gentleman. A story of want, identity, and losing control. An mature work, not just bad guys doing bad things, but sort of a mid-life crisis with a bit of police chase and some David Bowie music. Can't wait to read more from this duo.

Night Fever

Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips (Artist), Jacob Phillips (Colorist)

The American Dream

“Jesus Jon, you’re living the dream. House in the subarbs….”

The American dream, as infamous as the other clichés of the USA, like apple pie and fireworks on the 4th of July. A house in the suburbs is better than what the cave people had, right? So why is it a recurrent theme in literature, TV and movies, that the people who have it all, don’t really have it all? Night fever explores these themes. What happens when you reach the age of forty-five and have done so little? Lived life so well, played by the rules, worked, got married, had kids and you see that everyone else has done the same? Maybe you’ll lash out, do something unexpected – that’s what Night Fever is about.

It was off to a relatively slow start, I gave it the benefit of the doubt. I found myself reading and wondered how similar are we all? How many people have given up on their dreams? How many people have been crushed under the rotating cogs of life? A depressing thought, but an honest one. Something that we don’t often consider, that we leave in a dark place in our mind, only really getting it out when we want to torture ourselves. This is what Jon does late at night in in the graphic novel. Something we can all relate too. How many of us do things everyone else does? Can anything be unique in a world that’s billions of years old? I suppose R&R are advocates of this train of thought as we think they can the world keeps spinning, but human ingenuity is brilliant that’s why R&R are drawn to science fiction, because the stories written by great writers show that there is still the capacity for original thought and there always will be. The stars are our destination, but the world keeps expanding.

Graphic Novels

Although some were tropes, the life ‘unlived’ the fast characterisation with a deceased father and a flashback, I have learnt that this is a common theme with graphic novels. Graphic novels rely on fast paced stories. Unlike the seven series sprawling fantasy saga’s they give you a quick, sharp shot of story mixed in with stunning visuals and you forgive these tropes because you take them with the art as well.

Graphics

I enjoyed the dark silhouettes that passed through the character to compliment his dark thoughts, as though something had descended on him. Hadn’t slept in three nights, was this a dream? What’s real, what’s reality A man in a midlife crisis trying to reclaim his youth Crime is the biggest high in the world. This graphic novel reminded me of Super-Cannes, a brilliant book, by a brilliant author. A man finding himself wrapped up in a world of crime. I enjoyed the depictions of drugs and imagery that reminded me of Alice and wonderland The sharp, nostalgic, retro art style drew me to this graphic novel. I was hooked on the scenes and the 1970s feel of the thing.

Conclusion

A comic with an interesting premise, but not enough drew me into this one. I began to be reminded of Super-cannes, a fascinating look into the human psyche by J.G ballard and I realised that the novel was underdeveloped, even though the art was interesting, I don’t think its up there with the best I have seen.