Created by Christopher Cantwell & Victor Santos
It’s a place where Murder, Vice, and Corruption compete with Greed, Squalor, and Despair for his attention, but he soldiers on, consoling himself with the thought that “The worse the crime, the better the puzzle.”
Only hitch?
He’s only twelve years old.
Sure, he’s he’s one hard-boiled dick. He walks the walk. He talks the talk. He carries a slingshot, and he ain’t afraid to use it.
But he’s twelve years old!
In Kid Maroon, a light-hearted but edgy (and surprisingly gory, at times) romp of a graphic novel from 2025, he has to contended with an murderous arsonist, a gaggle of homeless orphans, a tiger escaped from the zoo, some knife-wielding thugs and more.
It also answers the eternal question “What if Mickey Spillane had written Dennis the Menace?”
It’s a hoot; buffeted along by illustrator Victor Santos’s artwork, which recalls early EC Comics fare, and really brought home when you hear the elaborate backstory that writer Christopher Cantwell has proudly served up, heralding the return into print — after seventy-five years —of “the world’s only hard-boiled boy detective.” Supposedly, Kid Maroon was a popular 1940s newspaper strip created by artist/writer Pep Shepard that had the Kid taking on gangsters and other criminals with his trusty slingshot, but was cancelled after less than a year, due to the outcry over Shepard’s “too clearly expressed love of violence, nihilism, and bathtub laudanum.”
All of which is bullshit.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Christopher Cantwell is an Eisner-nominated comic book writer of such titles as Doctor Doom, Iron Man, Star Trek: Defiant, She Could Fly, The Blue Flame, and a personal favourite of mine, DC’s Plastic Man No More. He is also the co-creator of the TV series Halt and Catch Fire, and is the showrunner for AMC’s The Terror: Devil in Silver.
Eisner and Harvey nominee comic writer and artist Victor Santos is the creator and co-creator of such works as Filthy Rich, Rashomon, Bad Girls, Against Hope and Violent Love, and he’s collaborated on projects with companies like Netflix, Fnac, Porsche, the Corvus Belli game company and artists like Deadmau5. His Polar quadrilogy, originally published by Dark Horse, was adapted as an original Netflix movie, and he continues to work in comics, TV and film.
STRAIGHT FROM THE AUTHOR’S MOUTH
- “I’ve been wanting to write a Kid Maroon story for years upon years now… Sure, his world is laden with pulp gangsters and killers, but he’s very much a child. This was always the undercurrent of the original Kid Maroon strips that Pep Shepard did. Sure, sometimes Pep occasionally had Kid rail against characters like Captain Pinko and write diatribes against Sales Tax, but at his best, those stories were always about a boy caught between worlds, his innocence always fragile, at risk of being shattered. That is the core of our book through and through.”
— Christopher Cantwell
UNDER OATH
- “Forget the marketing and the gimmicks; Kid Maroon is a fun slice of pulp that’ll charm your bowtie off and have you eyeing a move to Crimeville.
— Chris Coplan (September 2025, Comicbook Roundup)
GRAPHIC NOVELS
- KID MAROON | Buy the graphic novel | Kindle it!
(2025, Vault Comics )
Based on characters created by Pep Shepard
Written by Christopher Cantwell
Art by
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
