Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: The Interconnectedness of All Kings

Description

After writing all the many and conflicting versions of the legendary Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, beloved author Douglas Adams created Dirk Gently- a detective with a belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, a unique relationship with the laws of probability and physics, and a love of cats and pizza. In his first-ever comic series, Dirk has been forced to leave his beloved England behind, coming to the too-sunny, too-cheery, and altogether too-bizarre-even-for-Dirk city of San Diego, California, where he gets embroiled in three separate (or are they?) cases involving reincarnated Egyptians, golden cell phones, and copycat killers. All this in a new town seemingly incapable of making even a single proper cup of tea.

Chris Ryallis the Chief Creative Officer at IDW Publishing and the co-creator ofZombies vs Robotswith Ashley Wood. Ryall has also co-created and writtenGroom Lake, The Colonized, The Hollows, andOnyx, and has also written adaptations of stories by Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Richard Matheson. He is also the co-author of a prose book about comics,Comic Books 101, and has written comics based on the Transformers, the band Kiss, Mars Attacks, Weekly World News, and, currently, Hasbro's Rom. Ryall and ZvR co-creator Ashley Wood were nominated for the 2006 Eisner Award for "Best Short Story."

LIBRARY JOURNAL -- As the quirky "holistic detective" enshrined in popular Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) novels, Dirk Gently takes on multiple crises by pursuing random leads with the confidence that the "interconnectedness of all things" will bring about resolution. Now Dirk has relocated to San Diego, where his crises du jour include reincarnated Egyptians, serial killers, and (as with the first novel) a time traveler with an agenda. The result is great fun, largely because of the idiosyncratic personalities. Everyone has peculiar aspects beyond central casting, from Dirk and his married lesbian sidekicks to the Egyptians, the serial killers, the time traveler, and a homeless man with a golden cell phone. The art somewhat resembles Rob Guillory's work for Chew but less grotesque, and Guillory contributed several of Gently's single issue covers. Adams enthusiasts, however, may feel that the plot develops too straightforwardly and that this Dirk bears minor visual resemblance to the original character description. VERDICT Not all aficionados of the novels may find this Dirk caper up to their expectations, but others will enjoy Ryall's goofy mix of alliances, diverse characters, time-and-space bending, and synergy of all parts at the end.-MC