It helps more, of course, that Ahmed is a good writer, the same one who gave us Marvel’s best book of 2017, “Black Bolt,” with artist Christian Ward, and who has been entrusted, alongside artist Javier Rodriguez, with reviving the reality-hopping “Exiles” team book, which will feature a diverse lineup that includes Blink, an older Kamala Khan and a Tessa Thompson-inspired version of Valkyrie. His father was even a director of the Michigan Department of Human Services, according to an interview with Ahmed in the Detroit Free Press. It helps that writer Saladin Ahmed is a product of 1970s Detroit. Would that more books were this good at establishing premise this well this quickly. We also know the only thing that can throw her off her game is whatever is behind the grisly murders popping up across the city – because the same forces were responsible for the death of her first husband. (BTW, Kudos to letterer Jim Campbell for capturing the clicking and whirring sounds of the cameras of the day, back when cameras were standalone devices that made clicking and whirring sounds.) That’s probably the one fact of journalistic life in this book to which a modern reporter could safely reply, “Hold my beer.” We know Elena is an underfunded reporter at an underfunded newspaper (she has to walk past the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News buildings to get to work) because she’s made to take her own photos at a crime scene. It’s what keeps chaos at bay,” she tells someone. We know she orders the same omelet every morning from the local diner and ends each night with two brandies, one at the corner bar and one at home. We know she was married at least twice before. The trade-off, of course, was overt sexism and racism, as evidenced by the language of the board members who come downstairs to ream out Elena’s editor – whom I swear looks like the spitting image of one of my former bosses at The Press of Atlantic City – for a story Elena wrote on police brutality against a black teenager.īy the close of the first issue, we know a lot about Elena.
Comics detroit free press plus#
Plus she lives in that throwback era older journalists remember fondly, when everyone smoke and drank at their desks. Announcing her presence with a trail of cigarette smoke, a small orange neckscarf and no nonsense, she’s the hard-boiled investigative journalist most journalists wish they were. Quite frankly, the real-world stuff almost makes the supernatural stuff – represented by a black, amorphous tentacle apparition that is equal parts the smoke monster from “Lost” and the Mind Flayer from “Stranger Things” – uninteresting by comparison.įar from uninteresting, though, is Abbott. The white men who take every opportunity to bust Elena’s chops at crime scenes and in her own newsroom wear a panoply of sport coats and neatly parted hair straight out of the fight scene in “Anchorman.” Colorist Jason Wordie keeps the palette muted to suit the times.
Comics detroit free press series#
In 1972 Detroit, Elena Abbott investigates a series of brutal killings police blame on black radicals but she recognizes as the work of the supernatural.Īnd in all seriousness, if this were a comic just about a black female journalist in 1970s Detroit navigating post-riot racial tensions to chase a story, you’d still have a damn fine book on your hands.Īrtist Sami Kivela, whose previous works include “Beautiful Canvas” for Black Mask Studios and a number of books for Zenescope, gives us a 1970s Detroit in the midst of a cultural shift that feels both familiar to those who lived it and like a sociological case study for the rest. DC is doing it with “Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles,” and BOOM Studios is doing it with its new five-issue miniseries, “Abbott,” which launches Wednesday. The best new comics of this very young year have used historical fiction as an entry point for social commentary.
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