Comic Books/graphic Novels
Quite a few comic book impossible crimes seem to draw on the 'weird menace' tradition of the pulps. However, celebrated writers such as G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Clayton Rawson and Sax Rohmer have had their works adapted to comic book form. In 1934, Dashiell Hammett created the comic strip Secret Agent X9, illustrated by Alex Raymond, which contained a locked-room episode, albeit a rather feeble one. One American comic book that made good use of locked room mysteries is Mike W. Barr's Maze Agency.
French-speaking culture has long respected the comic book as a form of art in its own right, and it should come as no surprise that there are many comic books which feature impossible crimes. The popular Belgian comic book hero Tintin tackled a locked-room mystery in Le Sceptre d'Ottokar. The many adventures of the journalist Ric Hochet are replete with impossible crimes, for example: L'Assassin Fantome, Les Spectres de la Nuit, and La Nuit des Vampires.
Manga also has its locked-room adherents, such as the series Detective Conan written by Gosho Aoyama, which appears in English as Case Closed; notable locked-room issues are #3, #6, #7. A similar series, Kindaichi Case Files, features a locked room mystery in almost every story. Many of these are original, ingenious and meticulously explained; early examples are The Opera House Murders, Death TV and Smoke and Mirrors and finally the series Spiral: Suiri no Kizuna has a locked-room mystery called "The room with the special lock" in chapters 4 to 6.
Graphic novels also use this as a motif. For example, the series Umineko no Naku Koro ni by 07th Expansion has used the locked room mystery as the basis of the novel and also denying any possible answer the player comes to during the novel.
Read more about this topic: Locked Room Mystery
Famous quotes containing the words comic, books, graphic and/or novels:
“The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it.”
—Umberto Eco (b. 1932)
“The society would permit no books of fiction in its collection because the town fathers believed that fiction ‘worketh abomination and maketh a lie.’”
—For the State of Rhode Island, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists’ discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)