Bad Weekend by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips
Unlike many of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ other titles, Bad Weekend isn’t a noir-ish, hard-boiled tale of the criminal underworld. Rather, it’s a prickly but heartfelt ode to another kind of underworld: the comic book industry. Hal Crane is a comic book legend. He’s also a drunk, a cynic, and something of an asshole, but he kind of has good reason to be given how publishers have treated him over the years. Which means that babysitting him during a comic book convention is going to be a lot harder than it sounds. On the one hand, Bad Weekend confirms all of your fears of how bad the comic industry can be, filled with backstabbing publishers and artists who work their fingers to the bone for pennies. On the other hand, it’s also a tribute to the art itself, and how even a bitter, manipulative jerk like Hal Crane can create something transcendent.