My first contact with Ed Brubaker was when he wrote the series Sleeper. The online buzz was very positive, and I picked up the first of the collected editions. Seriously impressive: in a fully formed collaboration with artist Sean Phillips, the pair had conjured up a convincing noirish world of spies, superpowers, and subterfuge. The series is based round one smart conceit: that an agent is undercover in a criminal organisation, and the only person to know his true identity is in a coma.

Sleeper is a dark exploration of intrigue and morality, sure enough set in a superhero universe, but one in which the powers are metaphors for approaches to living. Without doubt it’s one of the smartest comics series in recent years, with a sledgehammer conclusion that makes utter sense in a truly twisted way.

So, having pegged Brubaker as a talent worth watching, I was bound to pick up more of his work, yes? As it turns out, the answer is a grudging yes, since after Sleeper Ed went over to Marvel, where he reinvented Captain America, a title I had zero intention of picking up. Only, I kept hearing it was good. Which made sense, given who was writing it. And the art, by Steve Epting, looked pretty fine too. Only, it’s Captain bloody America: please don’t make me buy a comic about a man who wears a stars and stripes costume with pointless ickle wings on the head. Well, I finally did, picking up a paving slab sized anthology of Brubaker’s first 30 or so issues on the series. And it’s very good indeed, a taut contemporary thriller that manages to utilise many elements of the hero’s past and incorporate them into a rattling and thoughtful Bourne style story that works really really well. If this is how good mainstream comics have got while I haven’t been watching, I’m more than impressed.

While Brubaker is doing a bunch of work on Marvel superhero titles, he’s also pushing out a creator-owned crime collaboration with the dark and edgy Sean Phillips. It’s called Criminal, and the third collection is just out. No funny costumes here, though the latest volume strays from that rule a bit what with it being set between 1967 and 1973. The emphasis is less on the impressive plotting of the other work I’ve read of Ed’s, and more on depicting characters caught up in classic noir situations. Deals gone wrong, women using their sexuality to get what they want while men use guns to do the same, and a world in which trust is the rarest commodity.

Make no mistake, Brubaker isn’t reinventing crime fiction here, other than in the fact that comics haven’t been used to tell stories like these before in my experience. And that’s fine. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. The stories are interconnected: the first two volumes are set here and now, while the latest happens three decades ago. But some of the characters and stomping grounds remain the same, which itself suggests something about the social and economic forces that lead people into a life of crime.

It’s psychology that really matters to Brubaker though: he gets under the skin of these characters in a way that gets you to empathise with them, however appalling the choices they have to make, and that takes more than skill. The secret - and this is what connects all of Ed’s comics that I’ve read - is that he cares about the characters he’s writing, and understands them as a mature human being. And that makes a big difference in comics, when - if their writing is anything to go by - so many writers are trying to recapture what got them excited when they were reading the same titles in their teens, but lack the intellect and empathy to deal with real people…