Comic fans have been spoiled for choice when it comes to quality crime and detective comics over the past few decades. Names like Greg Rucka, Brian Michael Bendis, and Ed Brubaker have penned countless tales with a variety of artists who inject the world with enough grime and atmosphere that they’re ready-made to come to life on screen. Others craft a stark world with artistry, taking unique perspectives on classic noir tropes. Success has risen from the shadows many times for these types of stories already, like Road to Perdition and A History of Violence. Both films started as graphic novels, making the jump with a few tweaks.
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Despite the success of other comic-to-screen adaptations, there are still quite a few crime comics just dying for the spotlight. A few are classics of the genre, while others take the themes and tropes to different levels. Some even still have that superhero element, like Batman. He doesn’t make a list like this, but the character has produced several staples.
1) Kill or Be Killed
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips will pop up several times on this list, but we’re going to start with Kill or Be Killed, which gives us vigilantism, real consequences, and a demon. 28-year-old grad student Dylan seems like who Holden Caulfield would become once he gets a bit older. Cynical, sexually frustrated, and furious at the world. After attempting suicide but strangely surviving, he’s visited by a demon that claims to have saved Dylan, but now he’s got to pay back by killing one person for each additional month he wants to live going forward.
Brubaker and Phillips are old pros by this point, resulting in an interesting crime story that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. It has a lot of what they already do well, but tosses in a modern setting and a twisted hook. There was a film adaptation previously in the works in 2017, but it would be safe to say that it isn’t happening almost a decade later.
2) 100 Bullets
While it starts as loosely disconnected story arcs that were self-contained, Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s 100 Bullets turns into a crime classic. It gets you at first with its hook, actually covering some similar ground to Kill or Be Killed. The early issues introduce Agent Graves and his offer to those out to right a grave wrong: A handgun, 100 bullets, and the information on their target. The bullets are untraceable, and police know not to investigate related crimes.
And once the series has you, then it ramps up the conspiracy underneath Graves. There’s a secret group known as The Minutemen, dating back to the founding of the New World, and responsible for the disappearance of the Roanoke colony. They act as enforcers for the Trust, the real owners of the world, and Graves’ offer is just one of their many experiments. And by this point, the story twists yet again. It’s Jason Bourne meets Faust and blended with Michael Mann.
3) Reckless
Another from Brubaker and Phillips, Reckless has spawned several standalone graphic novels following the titular hero, Ethan Reckless. Each volume is a standalone slice of pulpy goodness set in the 1980s and sees former undercover FBI agent turned hired gun do his pest private investigator impression. The series has five books and comes off like a grimy version of Magnum P.I. or Rockford Files.
4) Black Monday Murders
Jonathan Hickman at his expansive, detailed, esoteric best. For those who feel that True Detective featured actual supernatural elements, Black Monday Murders offers readers a look at that type of story pushed to wild lengths. Sadly, the book has been on hiatus due to artist Tomm Coker dealing with health issues.
But what the duo have put out gives readers a lesson in the schools of magic, filtered into a history lesson about the real-life stock market crash of 1987, and then delivered to readers through a detective noir story featuring the folks from Succession. But only if they made a blood pact with an evil god for wealth and control.
5) Parker
Richard Stark’s Parker is a crime-noir staple that has been adapted for the big screen numerous times. Lee Marvin portrayed the character in Point Blank, followed by Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Jason Statham, and even Mark Wahlberg. Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Porter in Payback is also another version of the stories, but they all pale to Darwyn Cooke’s adaptations for IDW in 2009.
The style is a must for any animated or live-action series that could spawn from these books. Cooke even had a short chance to work with author Donald Westlake, the man behind the Richard Stark pen name, up until his passing in 2008. So you’re getting some new pure story beats from the source, expanded and stylized by one of the best to ever sketch a scene.
6) MONSTER
Naoki Urasawa’s classic manga follows Dr. Kenzo Tenma, a neurosurgeon who puts his career in jeopardy after opting to treat a young patient shot in the head instead of the mayor. After the mayor dies, his life seems to spiral, and his career is frozen. Then the doctors who are against him start to drop dead, making him a suspect despite no evidence tying him to the murders.
Years after, Tenma is once again the Chief of Surgery and is back in the hospital’s good graces. But then, a cryptic warning of a monster from a criminal patient and a guard’s murder lead Tenma to Johan Liebert. The boy he had saved is now a grown man, and he’s also a ruthless murderer. That’s just the start. Guillermo Del Toro had been attached to a potential adaptation in 2013, but it seems to have fallen to the wayside.
7) From Hell
From a Japanese monster, we head west to the UK for a Victorian monster that terrorized the real-life streets of London. In From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell tap into conspiracy and history to give his point of view on the murders of Jack the Ripper. Through the story, he addresses some conspiracy theories, posits a potential suspect, and digs down into the seedy underbelly of the era.
This was adapted into a film starring Johnny Depp in 2001, but it has very little to do with Moore’s sprawling slice of the period. He’s also able to slice away layers and explore some deeper themes on the nature of time.
8) Top 10
Also from Alan Moore, we head in a slightly different direction that ventures back into the world of superheroes. These heroes don’t have to contend with the police for clean-up, though. That’s because they ARE the police. Citing influence from police procedural shows like Hill Street Blues, Moore delivers a look into a grounded profession within a very ungrounded world full of superheroes, powers, and crazy characters.
Similar to Astro City, Moore’s police force does their best to keep the superpowered citizens of Neopolis safe. It also stars a talking Doberman cyborg named Hyperdog, if you need another reason to pick up the book.
Did we miss any key crime stories on the list? Would you tune in to watch a streaming series for any of these? Let us know in those sweet comments.
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