Dominic Fortune

Created by Howard Chaykin Poor Marvel. Try as they might, they can't seem to lose the spandex. Whereas eternal rivals DC seem to have the sleuthing gene built right in their corporate DNA (DC, after all, stands for "Detective Comics"), Marvel has always struggled to come up with a credible crime or detective comic. Like, …

Sonambulo (aka Salomon Lopez)

Created by Rafael Navarro When the going gets weird, who ya gonna call? How about a masked Mexican wrestler turned Twilight Zone gumshoe? Combining the quirky-mondo tradition of pulp magazine private eyes, and the Mexican legend of Santos, plus a slew of cheapo midnight horror movies, comic book superheroes, and a healthy dab of Will …

El Borbah

Created by Charles Burns Here he comes, 400 pounds of heavenly fun, in a Mexican wrestling mask, no less! Who says I don't listen to you guys? A few years back, I received this letter from Frank Patterson: Kevin, I love the Thrilling Detective site! I've been a frequent visitor since I stumbled upon it …

Apocalypse Al (aka Allison Carter)

Created by J. Michael Straczynski "The name's Al. Short for Allison Carter. Private investigator, specializing in the end of the world. More specifically, preventing the same." It's pretty much the end of the world as we know it, unless Hollywood private eye ALLISON "APOCALYPSE AL" CARTER can put a stop to it. Mind you, what …

Frank Kafka

Created by Jacob Kurtz (aka Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips) "It never makes any goddamn sense." Now here's something you don't see everyday: a fictitious comic strip drawn by a character in a comic book. Is that meta enough for ya? FRANK KAFKA is the private eye hero of a popular daily comic strip titled, appropriately enough …

Carey McCandless & Jessica Williams

Created by J.C. Vaughan You have to give veteran comic writer J.C. Vaughan a thumbs up for persistence -- he's been trying to get his creator-owned private eye series, McCandless & Company, out for over fifteen years, toughing it out through broken promises, bad luck, false starts, revolving artists, a tangled reprinting history, and Lord …

Tiffany Sinn

Created by Gary Friedrich, Charles Wojtkowski and Vince Alascia "This spy business grows on one after awhile." You can roll your eyes all you want right now, but one of the more interesting female private eyes of the sixties was TIFFANY SINN who made her debut -- wait for it -- in the pages Career …

Betty Blake

Created by H.L. Parkhurst "The Girl Super-Detective Who Always Gets Her Man!" -- the tagline announcing a story coming up in the next issue A sort of classier, more upscale version of Sally the Sleuth, BETTY BLAKE appeared in a handful of two-page comic book stories in Super-Detective, a sister publication of Spicy Detective Stories, …

Sally the Sleuth

Created by Adolphe Barreaux Pseudonyms include Charles Barr (1899-1985) One of the oldest comic strip heroes ever, predating even the Man of Steel, SALLY THE SLEUTH first popped up in the November 1934 issue of Culture Publication's Spicy Detective pulp mag, in a steamy little two-page comic back-up feature nestled in there amongst all the other …

My Bookshelf: Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly

My Bookshelf Noir:  The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarertly Edited by Christopher Mills A year after his ambitious one-shot anthology The Detectives,  editor Christopher Mills let fly with the even more ambitious Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly, an attempt to re-create The Detectives on a regular basis. It never quite caught on, lasting a mere three …