Irregulars
Sherlock Holmes pastiches flourish in literature, theater, radio, cinema, and, as here, comics, often with one or more Holmesian^Bsupporting players at center stage. Writers Altman and Michael Reaves focus on Holmes' six street-urchin message-runners and legmen, the Baker Street Irregulars, in a confection that also surreptitiously draws on the Lovecraftian corpus. Crisis strikes when Dr. Watson is arrested for a Jack the Ripper-like murder; Holmes must go abroad, and he entrusts the Irregulars with investigating the matter. They uncover a Dr. Moriarty-aided plot to have some gigantic "Dark Ones," once worshipped in ancient Egypt, invade from an alternate reality and destroy London (Lovecraftians know this scenario, relocated across the pond). Before the game is run down, the Irregulars, paradoxically led by the smallest of them, have forayed into the destroyed London that somewhere, it seems, already exists. Philippine artist Bong Dazo's densely textured nineteenth-century London in both realities is so vivid in black and white that one virtually sees colors.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved