Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency #1 (IDW)

writer: Chris Ryall

artist: Tony Akins

The star of two and a half books from the late Douglas Adams (the first one, which has the same name as this comic; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul; and the eponymous lead from The Salmon of Doubt, a posthumous miscellany built around a new, incomplete Dirk Gently mystery) is now the star of a comic book as well.

And I had to make sure to read at least one issue, because I'm still kicking myself over skipping the DC adaptations of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy twenty years ago.  But, you see, I hadn't yet personally become a Douglas Adams fanatic.  This changed, oh, soon after the DC adaptations of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

At any rate, I have a confession to make: although I just self-identified as a Douglas Adams fanatic, aside from the original (well, novel version) Hitchhiker's, I have a terrible memory for most of what he actually wrote.  After Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I couldn't really tell you what the rest of the, ah, trilogy actually contains (I'm fairly certain the bit about learning to fly by forgetting to fall comes somewhere after the first two, but wouldn't really be able to narrow it any further).  Same with the Dirk Gently books.  I've long thrown my support behind Tea-Time as the best Adams book, but...other than having a clever use of Norse gods that was actually a good bit of timing as it nicely matched up with Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which I read at the same point in my life...I can't really say much more about it.

Which is to say, Adams was a writer for readers who truly loved reading.  His work oozed charm.  he was a master of the craft.  Having read many writers since my Adams-heavy days who, sadly, are not so gifted, to cherish him now is to remember that sometimes it really can be the writing itself that sets a writer's work apart.  And clearly, also his excessive cleverness.

So Dirk Gently, more directly...As depicted by Chris Ryall, Dirk could very easily be reduced to the genre of quirky detectives that took over TV a while back.  I mean, TV always had detectives, but quirky detectives, like Monk or even Psych (they were a good match for each other, those particular shows), became a whole genre quite easily.  And what is Dirk but a quirky detective, "holistic" in the sense that he really just...assumes any random thing he experiences will help him solve his case.  Ryall's presentation doesn't really stress the randomness of it so much as the interconnectedness of it, which is how Dirk chooses to view it and clearly how Adams wanted him to be understood.  But really, this is a quirky detective series.

But one that plays fast and loose with genre conventions.  As I said, Ryall is very deliberate in his approach.  Even though there's a big dramatic reveal at the end of the issue, it should really come as no surprise.  Dirk takes everything in stride.  In many ways, he's another version of the Adams Doctor Who stand-in, like Ford Prefect in the Hitchhiker's books.  You can throw anything at him and he won't be rattled.  For everyone else this is hardly likely to be the case.  But for Dirk...That's what helps set this quirky detective apart.  He's literally a platform on which anything can be done, which is why there are Egyptian mummies running around.  This is not quirk for the sake of quirk, which is what a lot of comics that don't feature superheroes opt for, but rather quirk for the sake of storytelling.  Who but Dirk Gently?

Thank goodness he finally came to comics!