Detectives, Inc.

IDW Publishing; $24.99

For about a million years, we’ve hoped we would see a hardcover collection of Don McGregor’s Detectives, Inc. Now it’s here.

His 1980 graphic novel A Remembrance of Threatening Green and its 1985 sequel A Terror of Dying Dreams were originally published by Eclipse Comics, and both of them conveyed the writer’s passions for detective fiction, social issues and even the great dynamic that played out between Robert Culp and Bill Cosby on I Spy.

With art on the first by Marshall Rogers and on the second by Gene Colan (who also illustrated McGregor’s Ragamuffins for Eclipse and Nathaniel Dusk, Private Investigator for DC), the reader gets to unique takes on the same set of characters.

Complex issues and difficult situations are just grist for McGregor’s mill, and the collected edition makes for some very thoughtful, adult reading.

Here’s how Ain’t It Cool News summed up Detectives, Inc.:

“McGregor sought to create a realistic private detective comic book, and he succeeded in spades, producing a violent, touching and emotional story. …[W]hat’s going on with the characters, how they relate to one another and the others in their lives, is equally as important as the plots they find themselves in. McGregor is as interested in why people do what they do and how they deal (or are unable to deal) with the demons they carry around. For the detectives, sometimes it seems the case is just a way of distracting them from their own problems, such as Denning’s attempts to deal with killing a teenage boy to save his partner in the prologue to the story, or Rainer’s ever-present strained relationship with his ex-wife.”

And that’s a pretty good description. Except, of course, it’s more complicated than that.