The comic news winter doldrums continue onwards, but the show must go on in Comics Disassembled, as I write about ten things I liked or didn’t like from the past week in comics, led by a perpetual headliner getting the headline spot once again.

Merry Brubaker and Phillips-Mas!

I’m late to this one, but you know when word of a new comic from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips hits, it’s going to be celebrated here. That’s despite the fact that we kind of always know one is coming, right? They’re an unstoppable engine of production, a constant in comics that deliver consistently if not predictably in form. Take their two comics from 2025 and their next one in the upcoming Five Gears in Reverse: A Criminal Book as examples of that. The first was The Knives, which was a sprawling graphic novel. The next was this week’s Giant-Size Criminal #1, an extra-sized one-shot filled with a big story and fun bonuses. Then there’s Five Gears in Reverse, which is the same length as the pair’s Reckless books, or about the length of a single trade paperback (although this is going to be a hardcover). They’re touring approaches these days, but I kind of look at Five Gears in Reverse’s size as their sweet spot.

That’s a lot of preamble without actually saying what this book is about. It’s another look into the life of the presently deceased but previously not Ricky Lawless, the resident wild man of the larger Criminal-verse, which is really saying something. It seems as if making the Criminal show — which Ricky is a key part of in the way he wasn’t necessarily in the original telling of the title’s first arc, Coward — has awakened something in the team, as this makes two straight comics that focus on this rarely explored character from the past. And Five Gears in Reverse sounds like a fun result, with the solicit describing it as “one of the wildest, most action-packed books” this team has done, one that predictably finds Ricky in a situation that goes “from bad to worse.” Ruh roh.

I hate to say it, but for at least this reader, what it’s about is almost immaterial in terms of my interest in this book. It’s Brubaker, (Sean) Phillips, and (Jacob) Phillips.

That’s all I need to know.

Angoulême, Taking a Break

In news that was only a matter of time until it happened, it’s now official: there won’t be an Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2026. I wrote about the hubbub around this before previously, but the gist of the controversy surrounding it is that everyone in the worldwide comic industry was out on Franck Bondoux and his company 9e Art+, which is a problem because they ran the event. It seems everyone wanted the company and Bondoux in particular out because of reports of toxicity, misogyny, and all kinds of other terrible things that had become a cultural constant of how 9e Art+ ran the show. Frankly, that seems like a reasonable ask to me, but what do I know?

But in the end, it apparently all came down to Bondoux and 9e Art+ calling the whole thing off while blaming everyone else and demanding they still run the show going forward due to their contract, because that’s how they do things I guess. It feels like an appropriate conclusion to the “will it happen or not?” saga surrounding the event of late.

It’s a mess, and too big of a mess to really properly highlight in this column. If you want the full story on Angoulême’s demise in 2026, I’d turn your attention to Dean Simons’ excellent reporting at The Beat. No one on the U.S. side of the comics press covered it as prolifically and well as he did. It’s a real situation, but Simons has been on top of it the whole time. Hopefully this ends in a proper result, one where the people whose hearts and minds are dedicated to this event are satisfied in the end. Because what Bondoux is proposing is not it, that’s for sure.