Thief of Thieves #8

Written by Robert Kirkman and James Asmus
Art by Shawn Martinbrough

When you watch a heist movie, things usually end with the criminals having pulled off an amazing job, and riding off into the sunset with their ill-gotten gains.  We never see what happens next. What's it like to wake up the morning after?  There would invariably be some loose ends of some kind or another that need to be addressed, some ruffled feathers that would need to be smoothed.

Basically, it looks like that is the premise of the second arc of Thief of Thieves.  When Robert Kirkman started writing The Walking Dead, he described it as what happens after the end of a zombie movie; I feel like Thief of Thieves is now doing the same thing for its own genre.

For this new arc, Kirkman is joined by James Asmus as 'writer' (I'm curious to know how much they collaborate - does Kirkman plot and Asmus script?  Does Kirkman just provide the rough idea, and Asmus the rest?), and we see what happens after Conrad pulled the wool over everyone's eyes (you really should read the first trade, if you haven't been reading the comics - it's great).

Augustus, Conrad's son, may be out of prison, but he now has to deal with the people whose heroin he lost.  Conrad has some pretty big obligations to pay off to Arno and his colleagues, plus, his ex-wife's new boyfriend is getting under his skin.

What makes this book work (aside from Shawn Martinbrough's excellent art) is the complexity of the characters, as developed by Kirkman and Nick Spencer in the first arc.  Conrad is a very interesting guy, and it's nice to try to work through his thought process.

I was a little worried that this book may not continue moving forward as well as it did in the beginning, but I see I have nothing to worry about.