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Detectives, Inc.

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Don McGregor and Gene Colan, two giants in the comics industry, crafted a tale that shatters the average person's preconceived notion of what a comic book is supposed to be like. This second volume of Detectives, Inc. features two struggling private investigators named Ted Denning and Bob Ranier, longtime friends whose consciences sometimes lead them to take cases that aren't exactly profitable. Both men have deep scars: Ranier from a painful divorce that has damaged his willingness to seek intimacy, and Denning from a time when he was forced to shoot someone.

Entering their lives is a tough social worker named Dierdre Sevens, who is drawn into trying to help an acquaintance who calls on her desperately when her husband has beaten her one too many times. Unsurprisingly, this friend backtracks on her story when Dierdre shows up and curses her when her husband arrives home. After a physical confrontation with him, Dierdre decides to hire Denning & Rainier to investigate the husband. What follows is a series of twists and turns involving emotional scars, hypocrisy, the bonds of friendship and the possibility of new hope, not to mention murder.

McGregor is a master wordsmith, delving deep into his characters' psyches, both hero and villain. While emotions run high, he's also able to inject a great deal of humor into the story with the easy rapport between the two detectives. Colan has long been respected as one of the greatest artists in the history of comics, and this black & white masterpiece is one of his finest works ever. His specialty is depicting mood & motion as well as being able to portray the subtleties of emotion on the human face.

This is a mature, introspective work that confronts and examines a number of issues without preaching or pretending to come up with all the answers. If you want to see a more human take on the detective genre, an interesting character study, or an example of what comics are capable of, check this graphic novel out.

IDW is really winning my heart with its reprints of great comics from the 1980's and 1990's. This B&W collection of writer Don McGregor's Detectives, Inc. comic stories comes with several prose pieces on the genesis of the comic, along with a piece on the filming of the Detectives, Inc. movie. My only caveat about the volume is that it's unfortunate that it couldn't be reprinted in a larger format -- the hyper-detailed art of Marshall Rogers on "A Remembrance of Threatening Green" originally appeared in a larger album size, and things do get a little squinty at times.

Quibbles aside, this is a tremendous achievement both in writing and art. The world of McGregor's private detectives, Rainier and Dennings, gets the hypercrisp, hyper-detailed treatment from Marshall Rogers (best known for his Batman work in the 1970's), and the moodier, more humanistic approach from Gene Colan (best known for Tomb of Dracula and about a dozen other books). Both art styles work, and both look great in black and white. Indeed, this may be the late Rogers' greatest work. The attention to detail is stunning, and Rogers experiments with some really fascinating one and two-page designs.

Private detectives aren't all that common in comic books unless they wear costumes or have occult powers. Rainier and Dennings remind me a lot of revisionist 70's PIs from the movies -- not so much Jake Gittes in Chinatown, as Rainier and Dennings are less cynical than Robert Towne's PI, but more the characters we see in films like Night Moves (with Gene Hackman on the case) and Cutter's Way (in which non-PI's John Heard and Jeff Bridges try to solve a case). They're battered and bruised sometimes, emotionally as well as physically, but they stay on the case.

McGregor invests his characters with a lot of heart -- he's one of the great comic book writers in terms of creating sympathy and empathy, at creating plausibly flawed and self-doubting protagonists, and at incorporating both sex and romance into a comic book without being prurient or exploitative. Highly recommended.

Detectives Inc. from creator/writer Don McGregor and artist Marshall Rogers is an important work in the evolution of the comic book medium. Best known for his work on Marvel's Black Panther and Killraven, this was a story that had been stewing in the back of McGregor's mind for over a decade. As an author, he had high aspirations for the types of stories he would tell and believed the possibilities for the comic medium had barely been scratched. With Detectives Inc., McGregor did his best to look ahead at what those possibilities could be and eschewed all "conventional wisdom" with regard to how a comic should look and what stories could be told. Knowingly taking a big risk, McGregor dove head first off the deep end and made it work. And it can be argued that with this book he helped to redefine the way comics were viewed.

This was the first book I had read by Don McGregor and I opened the first page with trepidation, worried it would suffer from the stilting dialogue and poor use of exposition prevalent in a lot of work from the early 80s. I was pleasantly surprised to find this was not the case. Certainly, there are spots where the dialogue sometimes gets preachy, but in most of these instances it falls in step with the characterization. The story was very compelling and refused to fall into melodrama. With this book, McGregor brought a gritty realism that I can only assume was sorely lacking within the comics medium at the time this first saw print in 1980.

In my opinion, this is an incredibly important comic. It came at a time, shortly after publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God, when creators closer to the mainstream began pushing at its boundaries. In Detectives Inc., McGregor ran headlong through any taboo you can name, dealing with lesbianism, divorce, racism, abortion, sex, nudity, and murder in a taut, literate, and intelligent manner. This would have been nearly impossible to pull off if his protagonists, Ted Denning and Bob Rainier, had not been such well realized characters. These two men are familiar because they deal with all the fears and insecurities everyone faces on a daily basis. The use of violence is not something they revel in, and in fact only leads to trouble down the line when Denning is again put in a situation where he must use his gun. Unable to discard the phantom of the boy he needed to kill, Denning hesitates for just a second. That is all the murderer needs as he runs Denning down with his car, leaving him on the edge of consciousness. Meanwhile, Rainier is still dealing with his recent divorce throughout the entire series, often unable to focus as his mind wanders to thoughts of sexual fantasy with any woman that may be near, including his stated feelings on this subject to his ex-wife. And if the expectation is that things will be tied up as neatly as on Law & Order or NYPD Blue then readers are in for a surprise.

Those who were not turned away by the subject matter - No capes? No cyclotrons? No anti-matter devices? - were not only in for a treat regarding the story, but also found McGregor and Rogers playing with the way a comic could look as well. McGregor set the story up as a graphic novel, with the emphasis on novel, and broke the story into chapters along with a prologue and epilogue. Each chapter was titled and opened with a few paragraphs of prose before starting into the traditional comic panels, which are beautifully drawn by Marshall Rogers. With this being a dense work, there are a lot of panels. And yet, Rogers manages to convey what is happening within those panels masterfully. Nothing seems cluttered, nothing is missing, and his storytelling is as clear as any artist. And despite utilizing many different panel arrangements - including one early two-page spread that includes 21 panels - one never has trouble following the story. It is obvious that Rogers felt as passionately about this story as McGregor did, and it shows through in the final product.

This was a big risk for both writer and artist. The direct market was in its infancy, as was Eclipse Enterprises, and then, as now, superheroes were king. The thought of trying to do anything outside of the strict boundaries of the spandex set was not at all a healthy gamble to take. For that aspect alone, as well as for the fact that McGregor and Rogers wished to attack the taboos that had plagued mainstream comics for decades, this is an extremely important book and one worth seeking out. McGregor realized the untapped potential of comics and challenged himself to live up to that potential. In doing this, he also challenged readers to expect more from their comics.

"There came a day when it wasn't kid stuff anymore."

Those were words that I felt with both gratitude and intensity when I learned that Don McGregor's Detectives Inc. stories would be collected into a hardcover book.

I remember sitting on the floor of a tiny apartment on a day in 1987, reading a three-issue story by Don McGregor and Gene Colan. It was really a single graphic novel, called Detectives Inc.: A Terror of Dying Dreams. Comic books had always been a haven of sorts for me. A place where I could retreat into a world of glorious color and equally glorious heroism; a place where things were resolved with the simplicity of a child's belief in right and wrong. On that day comic books became much more. In the pages of that story, I saw the dedication of the character Dierdre Sevens, who put her money, her time and caring into hiring the two detectives in the case of a battered wife in terrible denial. Later in the story, Dierdre and Bob Rainier were passing slow hours on a boardwalk, talking about abuse in their own lives. Their emotions were intense, angry, confused. They were seeking for ways to be heard, seeking to hear one another. Their exchange was painfully real; touching through a clear yearning in both of them to speak and have it be okay to have spoken...to know that one could break silence and not have to retreat in shame and fear afterward. That there was strength in being there to listen to one another.

When had the medium of comic books come to this place? Where a story like this could exist, could reach out with assurance that there would eventually come a time when the far side of pain could be reached; that hope and dignity could be waiting there?

As I wrote in the Afterward of this new edition of Detectives, Inc., I was powerfully inspired by these stories. Many years and countless re-readings later, they directly moved me to begin a project called Poets Against Abuse, which was all about using words as Don had used them: to tell gripping stories on one level, and on another to reach out with the kind of caring that brings an articulate voice to experiences that so often are left unspoken.

The stories of Detectives Inc. are at once raw and subtle, moving, heartbreaking, uplifting. The characters whose stories unfold in them are nothing short of alive and real; you can hear their voices, connect with their humanity.

Don McGregor's Detectives Inc. was in the forefront when stories of emotional truth were few and far between in any medium. Few creations have ever, to my mind, left such a legacy of life, of hard-edged awareness, of hope.

For those who aren't familiar with his work, Don McGregor has always been a trendsetter in comics. He made his name avoiding standard super-hero fare, instead doing the political high adventure Black Panther (in Jungle Action), the philosophical science-fiction feature Killraven, and a number of horror scripts for Warren Comics. But Don also was one of the first who broke away from the big companies to create and own his own characters.

Among his first creator-owned works was the first Detectives, Inc. graphic novel, A Remembrance of Threatening Green. It introduces his memorable Ted Denning and Bob Rainier, two struggling detectives who are long-time friends. This story is so absorbing because like in so many McGregor works, the plot serves the characters rather than the other way around.

Denning and Rainier both have their crosses to bear, as we soon learn. Denning is haunted by killing a man in self-defense. Rainier is still shattered by his divorce, unable to let go of his wound. Rainier's ex-wife asks him to take on a murder case involving a friend of hers. It turns out that a mid-wife's girlfriend has been killed in a hit-and-run accident, but she suspects foul play.

Don takes a potentially sensationalistic topic, homosexuality, and treats it like exactly what it is: simply another aspect of being human. The way Rainier drifts off into fantasizing about their client, a lesbian, imagining her in very typical male fantasies is replaced by understanding that the two of them had very similar senses of loss. They both had deep scars and were able to share their pain, not as male and female or gay and straight but two human beings who were not only alone, but whose link to intimacy had been taken away in a cruel manner.

Denning and Rainier work through a number of different suspects as a number of twists and turns reveal some interesting things about all of the characters, and the final confrontation delivers the action genre goods. But the focus of the book is the friendship between Bob & Ted. The two men share a bond deeper than words can express, and their easy, humorous rapport helps both cope with the issues they're dealing with.

The art is exquisite, with the fabulous Marshall Rogers giving us a detailed tour-de-force filled with grit and whimsy. The panel design is imaginative, with a certain cinematic influence. This is McGregor at the top of his game, and any fans of comics, the detective genre will like it and anyone interested in a complex exploration of relationships will love it.

The two "Detectives Inc." graphic novels, with art by the late Marshall Rogers and by Gene Colan, respectively, are, aside from being beautifully written, humanistic detective novels, landmark graphic novels. They are among the very first graphic novels in the modern form, the first of them being published in, I believe 1980. And aside from Will Eisner's hardcover & trade-aoer "A Contract with God" (a series of short stories rather than a single story)and Jules Feiffer's hardcover-only "Tantrum" (a single-panel-per-page story), these are the first graphic novels about ordinary people, and not heroic-adventure fantasy. (And even the Feiffer book had a plot-crucial fantasy element.)

The "Detectives Inc." novels paved the way for future graphic novels about ordinary people; they helped prove that such stories could work, and work well, in paneled-narrative book form. While daily comic strips had mined that form, and while there were collections of detective or medical or other strips that formed de facto book narratives, such collections contained the artificial daily climax that serial strips require -- giving them a style and rhythm much different from those of a single long narrative. "Detectives Inc." proved that these kinds of stories could work in this form, and for anyone who wants to truly understand the graphic novel and how it evolved to what it is today, these works are cornerstones that no serious comics fan or detective-novel fan should be without.

During his famous run penciling Batman stories in DETECTIVE COMICS, with Steve Engelhart writing the story and Terry Austin providing the inks, Marshall Rogers showed that nobody (with the possible exception of Frank Miller in his DAREDEVIL stories) could convey New York City's grimy and cluttered Seventies urban landscape in graphic narrative form quite as evocatively. Soon afterwards, with DETECTIVES, INC., he got the chance to draw New York as it is rather than in thinly fictionalized form as "Gotham City"; this remarkable early graphic novel is worth owning if only just for his haunting and brilliantly detailed cityscapes. The graphic novel (the first naturalistically drawn one after Will Eisner's A CONTRACT WITH GOD) is essentially a gritty detective novel following a two-man operation, Ted Denning and Bob Rainier, who are hired by a midwife to find the murderer of her female lover; this was the first mass-market American comics story to explicitly portray lesbian lovers. Don McGregor's mystery is a good one, and he makes his heroes (particularly Rainier) sensitive and fleshed-out characters. Marshall Rogers's graphic experimentation (particularly in terms of layout) can take some getting used to, especially since he packs so much onto each page. But like his work for DETECTIVE at DC Comics and DOCTOR STRANGE at Marvel, there's something practically breathtaking about seeing how fertile and inventive his imagination is; he keeps trying different approaches--some which work, others which don't--to see what he can do that's new. I can't think of any other text (standard or in sequential art form) that can give the reader a better sense of what Manhattan was like in the very late 1970s: crowded, dirty, massive, and intensely alive.

In amongst the capes and tights and adolescent power fantasies that pass themselves off as the American comic books, there are a handful of dedicated creators out there who are attempting to push the medium to be more than it is. DON McGREGOR has been pushing for a long time. Back in the '70s, when he was writing Black Panther (in the pages of JUNGLE ACTION) for Marvel, he was told his work was "too close to the black experience." The person saying it meant it as a negative, but since Don is in fact a white guy, I can't think of too much higher praise a white writer working on a title with a black central character and a mostly black supporting cast could ask for. Flash forward a few years, Don is again pushing the envelope. This time for creator rights. Among the creator-owned characters he brings to life are private detectives Denning and Ranier, the stars of this (and so far one other) DETECTIVES, INC. book. The Culp and Cosby of the comic book set. These guys are low on cash, strong on ethics, and positively white hot on intrigue, action and great, great dialogue. He could have sold them to one of the big publishers and produced some watered-down version, but he didn't. He stuck to his guns and with artist Marshal Rogers executed one of the most original graphic novels to ever come off the presses. Real characters. Real problems. Real suspense. This recently published 20th anniversary edition is a superb introduction to these characters, and a great private detective story on its own. GET THIS BOOK!