Created by Patrick Coyle
Forget love, sweet love. What the world needs now is an immortal mummy private eye.
Fortunately, comics creator and long-time fanboy Patrick Coyle has given us one, in the crowd-sourced, eponymously titled comic GRANT BIXBY, PRIVATE EYE.
Apparently it’s taken 30 years (and a Kickstarter campaign) to bring Coyle’s dream to life, but from what I can see (as of this post, the comic’s release is still a few months way), it’s worth it. This is no crudely drawn, hastily photocopied black-and-white hack job, but a slick, totally professional 80-page, full-colour original comic, available in a variety of formats, including digital, with art by people who can actually draw. The interior art is illustrated by Gonzalo (Quique Hache Detective) Martínez, and Coyle has assembled a dream team of pros for variant covers and assorted Kickstarter bonus tchotchkes.
The story goes that that back in the 1930s, Bixby was just a run-of-the-mill Harbor City beat cop who stumbled on a museum heist in progress, and inadvertently unleashed the Pharaoh’s Curse upon himself.
OOOPS!
And so Bixby became a living mummy, immortal and doomed to walk the earth for eternity. With career opportunties severely limited, he had no choice but to become a hard-drinking, gun-toting, two-fisted private eye, specializing in “supernatural matters.”
As one does.
Naturally, once you’ve got a mummy detective, pretty much anything goes, and so the whole thing’s a fanboy wet dream, stuffed with biker werewolves, zombies, rockabilly vampires, robot women, witches, demons, gunslinging scientists and plenty of rock ‘em, sock ‘em action.
It’s a genre mix-and-match. With two guns a-blazing, Bixby is a throwback to such trigger-happy shamuses as Race Williams and Three Gun Terry, and the assorted monsters are straight out of about a zillion cheesy sci-fi and horror B-films. Coyle himself describes it as “Hellboy meets The Shadow with a sprinkle of Batman: The Animated Series.”
Me? I just think it all looks like a helluva lotta fun.
We’ll see…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Long-time fanboy Patrick is a former indie publisher who co-founded Komikwerks, one of the first companies to post creator-owned comics online. He’s been making comics since he was 11 years old, and has published several print anthologies. Bixby Grant, Private Eye, is his first full-length, self-published comic, and he’s super pumped about it.
COMICS
- BIXBY GRANT, PRIVATE EYE
(2023)
80 pages
Wriiten by Patrick Coyle
Art by Gonzalo Martínez
Bonus artwork by Rafael Albuquerque, Jesse Lonergan, Gonzalo Martínez- “Wolf She Cried” (April 2023)
Includes a stand-alone 7-page back-up story.
- “Wolf She Cried” (April 2023)
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- Bixby Grant, Private Eye
The Kickstarter page. Apparently no longer taking donations. - Patrick Sucks at Drawing
The author’s YouTube channel, which follows his battle with creativity and inspiration, and features interviews with comics and animation professionals. - I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts
Things That Go Bump in the Night, and the Eyes Who Go After Them
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
