The Sinners Back in Print This Week, a Sean Phillips Preview, and More!

The fifth volume of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips' Criminal is back in stores tomorrow.  Now published by Image Comics, "The Sinners" was the first arc originally released as a mini-series, with the previous four arcs published in two volumes of an ongoing series.  The arc is also the last we've seen of the present-day world of Criminal, with the subsequent stories being set in Teeg Lawless' heyday.

UPDATE, 3:00 AM ET, JUN 3:  Earlier tonight, Ed Brubaker relayed that the cover's color scheme had changed, and just now Sean Phillips posted the final cover art, which we're reprinting below -- a bold RED replacing the more muted blue tones found in the original solicitation.

We posted some spoiler-ish thoughts on the story arc in a comment thread when the final issue was released, and I still think it's a very strong story but not quite as jaw-dropping as the story arcs that preceded it and followed it.

Comic Book Resources still has its five-page preview of the first issue, from 2009.

Checking his blog, we see that Sean Phillips has announced a very interesting art exhibit -- Phono+Graphic: 60 Vinyl Record Covers by 60 Comicbook Artists.  Phillips is curating the exhibit for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival, in Kendal, England, this October.

And, on Twitter, Phillips has provided an advanced look at the art for a bonus essay by Devin Faraci, no doubt for an upcoming issue of The Fade Out:  a gorgeous painting of Errol Flynn in 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Last time, we mentioned Brubaker and Phillips being featured in the cover story for the latest issue of the e-magazine Noir City.  The magazine's website currently features a PDF preview of a different article that our readers might find interesting, a look at Will Eisner's The Spirit and its parallels with film noir.

(Dig around the site, and you'll find an archive of preview articles, including crime novelist Lawrence Block's five favorite noir films.  Echoing Charles Ardai, the publisher of Hard Case Crime, Block defines noir as "crime fiction written by a pessimist.")

Finally, we had noticed that the Heretick Theatre Lab had a rebroadcast of The Noir Series, which included Ed Brubaker's play "Air Conditioned Rooms," but that particular encore presentation had come and gone before we noticed it.   The rebroadcast is now on the theater company's home page, with all four plays available for 48-hour rentals, for $0.99 each.