This is a series about … well, series. I do so love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies. I’ve already got a list of series I’ve recently read, re-read, watched, or re-watched that I plan to blog about. I might even, down the line, open myself up to letting other people suggest titles I should read/watch and then comment on.
At least once a year, I Tweet at DC Comics about what older, now defunct, series they should collect in bound (softcover, hardcover, whatever works) editions. Somewhere at the top of that list pretty much every time are two long-out-of-print series: Nathaniel Dusk Private Investigator, and Silverblade. We’ll get to Silverblade in a future installment. Today, I want to wax poetic about Nathaniel Dusk.
Nathaniel Dusk appeared in two eponymous four-issue mini-series from DC. The first, Nathaniel Dusk Private Investigator (subtitled “Lovers Die at Dusk”) was published with cover-dates of February to May, 1984. The second, Nathaniel Dusk Private Investigator II: Apple Peddlers Die at Noon, was cover-dated October 1985 to January 1986. And that was it. Other than a profile in DC’s Who’s Who in the DC Universe, and a quick cameo in an unusual issue of Lobo, Dusk hasn’t been seen again. (He apparently shows up as a movie character played by an actor in the recent Doomsday Clock maxi-series from DC, but I haven’t read that yet.)
Dusk should be a much more well-known character than he is. That he’s somewhat faded into obscurity to me feels like a crime (although not the type of crime ol’ Nate himself would investigate. Not enough blood or bullets in it). He should be up there with Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Mike Hammer. He’s of their ilk, created in homage but not slavishly so (definitely not as violent as Hammer, although they inhabit the same streets only a decade or so apart). He’s got his own history, his own character, and thanks to Gene Colan, his own distinct look. But the publishing gods were not kind. Despite the powers-that-be at DC backing the idea for two mini-series, Dusk just never took off well enough to come back for a third round. Would it have been different if the book had been launched as an on-going title from the start, without that year-plus gap between the two minis? We’ll never know.
Created by Don McGregor and based at least in part on Robert Culp in his “I Spy” days, Dusk is a private investigator (a “peeper,” as several characters call him throughout the books) in 1930s New York City. He’s a former World War One flying ace, a former NYC cop who couldn’t stomach the shadier side of the NYPD and so struck out on his own as a PI. He’s still got a good relationship with his former partner in the detective squad, Murray Abrahams, but we never really get to see how he is with the other cops he used to work with. Dusk is disgruntled but not totally world-weary. He may not like People as a herd, but he likes individual persons well enough. Of course, it’s his job to be cautious, to question everything – although sometimes, as these things go, he asks the right question too late. Which tells us he’s not perfect. I like my heroes on the fallible side, so it’s no surprise I really like Nathaniel.
The books are peopled with supporting characters you want to care and know more about because Dusk clearly cares about them: Oscar Flam, the local newsstand operator has a paralyzed young son; Freddie Bickenhacker, the shoe-shine guy is a former Wall Street biggie who lost it all in the stock market crash and believes he’ll work his way back up. Dusk is dating a young widower, Joyce Gulino, with two young kids, Jennie and Anthony, with whom Dusk has a playfully adversarial relationship. Throughout the two books, Dusk is also surrounded by strong women who know what they want and who will do whatever it takes to protect the people they love. Sometimes this backfires on them (it is noir, after all) but not always. There are also mobsters a plenty at the heart of each story, because what is New York or Atlantic City or Chicago in the 30s without gangsters. (I’d like to think that if there’d been a third mini-series, McGregor would have varied things up a bit.) This is a well-developed world, grounded in the reality of 1934-35 NYC: in one of the issue’s essays, McGregor gives a taste of the level of research he did to keep things as accurate as possible.
At the time these books came out, first person narration captions were not the prevalent storytelling mode in comics that they are now. Most of the other books published at this time from the Big Two still had omniscient narrator captions that allowed the action to jump away from the main character and back again, with the hero’s thoughts relegated to balloons. Dusk narrates the entire story himself (the same way Marlowe would: poetic turns of phrase here, quippy wordplay there, a bit of navel-gazing introspection usually at just the wrong moment) – there are no cut scenes to give the readers information Dusk lacks, which makes for a pair of very fair-play mysteries for the reader. The clues are there to be followed, sometimes in what characters say and sometimes in their physicality.
And if that’s not a segue to talk about the art, nothing is. Both mini-series were shot directly from Gene Colan’s uninked pencils and then those stats were colored. The process was, I think, fairly experimental at the time of the first mini-series, but the results are much sharper in the second. (Folks more knowledgeable about the history of this process, feel free to chime in in the comments.) Either way, what we gets is a sense of the fluidity of Colan’s artwork that was sometimes lost depending on who was providing the ink work (Tom Palmer over Colan on Marvel’s Tomb of Dracula was a one-of-a-kind pairing that brought out the best in both artists, in my opinion). Colan understood the hard-boiled detective genre as well as McGregor did, and he knew how to make it work in comics form. He gets across the danger and the high speed chases but also the grit of NYC in winter and summer (two very different feelings) and the romance/sexual tension that is part and parcel of these stories. And the lack of inks allows colorist Tom Ziuko to do some really amazing work. Sometimes the colors are more muted, sometimes they pop at the eye. There are sequences washed entirely in grey tones for memories, for blinding rainstorms. (Interestingly, the covers of the first mini-series are all inked: 1, 3, and 4 by Dick Giordano, #2 by Bob Smith, and they convey a very different tone from the more pulp-influenced uninked-but-colored covers of the second mini-series.)
It would be great to see a new Nathaniel Dusk book hit the stands. The character is perfect for Hard Case Crime’s line of novels and comics, and they seem to be having some success bringing Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty’s Ms. Tree back into print. Sadly, I think the rights to Nathaniel Dusk are owned by DC. Even more sadly, Gene Colan left us in 2011, and I’m not sure I’d want to see Nathaniel drawn by anyone else.
But the least DC can do is give us a nice hardcover Nathaniel Dusk The Complete Series to sit on our shelves alongside the Marv Wolfman – Gene Colan Night Force The Complete Series they gave us last year. (And a Cary Bates – Gene Colan Silverblade to go with that, a voice whispers – but that’s a different Series Saturday post).