For Your Consideration: Detectives Inc.

by Robert Greenberger

Detectives Inc. cover

Detectives Inc. cover

Two things were happening more or less simultaneously in the 1970s. First, there was the rise of the direct sales market which helped fuel the options for publishers. Growing out of the underground comix movement came the “ground level” publishers, several of whom were helping shape and develop the American graphic novel field.

There was Richard Corben’s Bloodstar, based on a story from Conan creator Robert E. Howard, and then NBM founder Terry Nantier called his works “graphic albums”, borrowing the European term for what we know today as a graphic novel. He began publishing European works in America starting with French artist Loro’s Racket Rumba and Enki Bilal’s The Call of the Stars. But, through the early to middle ‘70s, these were all science fiction and fantasy works.

That began to change, a bit, when Eclipse Books, a Brooklyn-based independent publisher formed to release Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species by writer Don McGregor and artist Paul Gulacy in 1978. What’s significant about this 48-page offering is that it was the first graphic novel sold in the newly created direct market shops. Later that year saw the first publication of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, so together, they showed that non-fantastical elements could drive stories.

Eclipse’s success with Sabre led them to publish McGregor’s next work, Detectives, Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green. The atmospheric writer was partnered this time with Marshall Rogers, a name usually associated with his run on Detective Comics with Steve Englehart just a few years earlier. The storyline featured two Manhattan private detectives, a “buddy cop” story which was very much in vogue during the decade

While the original black and white graphic novel won acclaim and sold well, it was five years before McGregor revisited them in Detectives Inc.: A Terror of Dying Dreams, this time with legendary artist Gene Colan providing his moody pencilled work. Over the years, these stories have been reprinted in numerous formats from different publishers but this month, IDW will be collecting both in a hardcover for the very first time.

To his credit, McGregor didn’t shy away from controversial topics, especially in the times he wrote these works. The first saw Ted Denning and Bob Rainier hired by a midwife to find her lesbian lover while the second offering looked at wife-beating and social classes. The author had these characters and their story in mind since 1969 when he wanted to make a movie about them and it wasn’t until 1985 before he even managed to self-produce a short film version. Still, the partners, Caucasian and African-American were unusual back in the 1970s when overt racial issues were more of a problem than they are today. Between the bi-racial partners and the lesbian storyline, let’s just say the initial reception was a little more pointed than that month’s Spider-Man release.

Still, you have McGregor writing from the heart, creating enduring characters and crowding the panels with purple prose and lots of dialogue. His artists, Rogers and Colan, clearly relish drawing something other than capes and cowls and bring their A games to the stories.  With crime fiction back in style these days, the timing couldn’t be better to reintroduce these pioneering works to a new generation of readers. McGregor, one of the most distinct voices to emerge in the 1970s, hasn’t been heard from in a long while so we’ll have to settle for a nice package with some of his best work.

Purchase Detectives Inc.

USER COMMENTS

We'd love to hear from you, feel free to add to the discussion!


Notice: Undefined variable: user_ID in /home/wfcomics/public_html/blog/wp-content/themes/westfield2010/comments.php on line 73