What if you had it all: wife, kids, stable career that involved international travel, but that wasn’t enough so you stumble into another identity and a wild world of sex, violence, and weirder, let’s say, more hallucinogenic things. This is the premise of Night Fever, a new graphic novel from Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Jacob Phillips that is dropping this summer. Night Fever‘s Jon is a foreign book buyer for a prestigious publisher and is off to a convention in Paris to get sales for his company. However, an advanced reading copy he flips through on the plane features a dream very similar to one that he has been having, and this leads to sleepless nights and the exact opposite of a boring day at the convention as Jon takes the new name Griffin and gets into incidents that are more Grand Theft Auto than the literary fiction that he peddles.
This overall tone of insomnia and losing touch with reality pervades much of Night Fever, especially its visuals with Jacob Phillips picking a big background color for each setting from red for a masquerade party to a cooler blue for Jon’s tossing, turning existential crises and others as the book progresses. The chosen color is a like a guide post through the askew angles and surreal storytelling choices from Sean Phillips and also help you get into Jon’s headspace as he begins to do things he’s only read about in books and sheds his boring, working life for a bit at night. The almost neurotic narration from Brubaker does act as a kind of tether between Griffin and Jon while also adding psychological depth to him. Ed Brubaker’s captions continue to be some of the best and are additive to the visual experience like a director’s commentary to a thrilling film.
And speaking of thrilling, Night Fever has some exciting set pieces that I won’t spoil the context of in this review and are more immersive because Jon/Griffin is definitely someone who most people think that they could take in a fight and probably drives the speed limit on the highway. Seeing him and his new friend Rainer getting in chases, fist fights, and even wilder situations after the staid conversations and plane trips of the book’s early pages reminded me a lot of films, books, and comics where a regular Joe worker becomes a heroic, or in this case, more active figure in the narrative of their life. In fact, the insomnia angle reminded me a lot of Fight Club (Which actually got comic book sequels), but with less satire and more of a focus on Jon’s personal journey and intoxication with this sexy, fisticuff filled alternate world instead of doing his job and going back to wife and kids. Brubaker and Phillips take a seasoned perspective on this escapism while still not undermining the fact that it’s easy to get into ruts in life even when you think gotten everything you ever wanted.
Night Fever is a midlife crisis dressed up in Day-Glo with insightful scripting from Ed Brubaker and dreamy art from Sean Phillips plus some of the best coloring work ever done by Jacob Phillips. It’s best read late at night before getting up for your shitty day job and succeeds both as a character study and a thrilling genre story with a unique visual language that makes it stand out from Brubaker and Phillips’ other collaborations.
Night Fever arrives in shops on June 14.
Story: Ed Brubaker Art: Sean Phillips Colors: Jacob Phillips
Story: 8.0 Art: 9.0 Overall: 8.5 Recommendation: Buy
Image Comics Comics provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review
Purchase: Bookshop – Amazon – comiXology/Kindle
