The Maze Agency: "The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident" and Other Stories by Mike W. Barr et al.

Somewhat belatedly—I think while writing up the previous post in this sequence—I discovered that there were actually three Maze Agency short stories that had been published outside of the regular Maze Agency comic series. One was a comic story published in a one-shot from Alpha Productions called The Detectives; the other two were prose stories, which could be found in an installment of the quarterly series Noir (a mix of comics and prose) and an anthology called Sex, Lies and Private Eyes. So I tracked them down to cap off this series. (When the hypothetical Maze Agency omnibus is released, hopefully it will include them all.)

The comic story in Detectives #1 (which has a cover by original Maze Agency ongoing artist Adam Hughes), "The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident," is just ten pages, and so can't be as complicated as most Maze Agency stories, but is pretty good regardless. Its main downside is that you only get any clues at all about a page before it's all revealed, so there's not really a chance to "play along" as the reader... but it's not like I was ever going to do that successfully in any case! Paul Pelletier is a solid artist here (I mostly know him from small bits and bobs on series like The Darkstars or Blue and Gold), and I would have gladly seen more Maze Agency from him.

The other two are, like I said, prose stories. It's weird when characters originated in comics make the jump to prose, in my opinion; I think a lot of time there's a kind of flatness. Comics tell you interiority through  mostly external cues, especially in a series like The Maze Agency, which has no narration. I spent some time reading a bunch of superhero-comics-turned-prose-stories, and I found it was hard to imagine a lot of superhero characters as actually having vivid interior lives—not just for me, but obviously for the writers! Mike Barr isn't inexperienced in prose (I actually read a couple of his prose Star Trek works two decades ago now), but he doesn't really go for interiority at all here: the narrator is distant from Jen and Gabe. This can work in a detective story, but it did make me feel like these weren't really playing to the strengths of the medium.

from Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly #1

Weirdly, both "The Heat Is On" and "Murder Gone Wylde" are about pornography: the former about an adult video store, and the latter about a producer of porn DVDs. I found "The Heat Is On" had a good sense of atmosphere that worked well, but the actual mystery was slight; "Murder Gone Wylde" has an engaging set of characters and suspects, and was a lot of fun... unfortunately, I think it might have been even more fun as an actual comic! Still, as one last way to spend time with Jen and Gabe (and Lieutenant Bliss, etc.), you could do a lot worse. Did Barr ever write any original mystery novels? I feel like he could have done good things with that canvas.

"The Adventure of the Chinese Dissident" originally appeared in issue #1 of The Detectives (Apr. 1993). The story was written by Mike W. Barr, pencilled by Paul Pelletier, inked by Bob Cram Jr., lettered by Susan Dorne, and edited by Christopher Mills. 

"The Heat Is On" originally appeared in issue #1 of Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly (Winter 1994). The story was written Mike W. Barr, illustrated by Rick Magyar, and edited by Christopher Mills. 

"Murder Gone Wylde" originally appeared in Sex, Lies and Private Eyes (2009). The story was written by Mike W. Barr and edited by Joe Gentile and Richard Dean Starr.

This is the last in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)
2. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #6-23 (1989-91)
3. The Maze Agency vol. 2 #1-3 (1997-98)
4. The Maze Agency vol. 3 #1-3 & vol. 4 #1 (2005-23)

Two related posts cover Noir Quarterly and Sex, Lies and Private Eyes.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow

July 2387
My guess is that I am going to reach book III of Coda and decide Coda was a bad idea. Some might roll their eyes at this declaration, but I just want to put my cards on the table as a reviewer. People are allowed to go into works of art with a suspicion of what they will think about them, contra the opinions of some creators. But, also, maybe I am wrong! Certainly I have my own thoughts on what a "novelverse" wrapup trilogy should have done, but we'll see.

Star Trek: Coda, Book II: The Ashes of Tomorrow
by James Swallow

Published: 2021
Acquired: October 2021
Read: August 2025

That said, if it had to be done this way, The Ashes of Tomorrow is probably about the best it could have been done. James Swallow's novel picks up from the end of book I, Moments Asunder, with Devidians devouring the galaxy. Whereas Moments Asunder mostly focused on the Enterprise-E crew, this book begins with them, but as it goes on, increasingly focuses on the Deep Space Nine cast. Yes, Picard and Worf are there, but the series cast who are all there, getting the spotlight, are the DS9 ones.

It's really effective. One of the great things the original DS9 relaunch did was be willing to move on from the tv characters in the configuration we had known them... but this does mean that it's been eleven years of story time and twenty years of real time since Sisko, Kira, Bashir, O'Brien, Odo, Quark, Jake, and Nog got together to solve a problem as a team. Swallow very effectively hits the nostalgia button here; I loved the scene where they all end up together, trying to figure out what can be done about this problem. Swallow has a very strong command of their voices.

If I have a complaint, it's that while most of the novel-original characters (e.g., Taran'atar, Vaughn) had been killed off by this point, we don't get a return appearance by, say, Shar or Prynn. This is the end of the litverse after all; most of these characters could be seen again... but not Shar! There is at least a lot of Ro Laren. (James Swallow can't make the USS Robinson crew interesting, alas, but he does wisely avoid even mentioning most of David R. George's other post–Typhon Pact recurring cast. Sorry not sorry, Jefferson Blackmer. You will forever be Starfleet's worst and most boring chief of security. Your space station is being purposefully destroyed, and your boss doesn't even mention you.)

Almost all of the characters get great moments. Nog dies—but he dies saving Jake. Jake saves the lives of a bunch of civilians (and we learn he wrote a novel based on the events of Rising Son). Quark and Ro have a genuinely emotional scene about growing old together. Odo gets a couple good gotcha moments. O'Brien's death isn't as impactful as some, but he goes out swinging. I found that Swallow captured Quark best of all. I liked that it was Quark who most objected to the plan to destroy the wormhole, and the scene where he says he's staying behind to protect what's most precious to him, which Ro initially thinks means the bar, but turns out to mean her, is great. Quark always comes through when it matters, and Swallow nailed that here. (Also good: "it's very presumptuous of you to assume that I'd just go along with this, without complaint." "I never assumed you wouldn't complain.")

I wasn't a huge fan, though, of how the Bajoran prohecy was just a maguffin, only of relevance as yet another portent of the apocalypse. At its best, DS9 managed to also use stuff like that to say something interesting about faith, but that's absent here.

This book also does the "flashes of random established characters in action scenes to show the scope of the crisis" thing more effectively than Moments Asunder, with appearances by Martok and Klag, for example. No full-on IKS Gorkon, but I'll take what I can get. (Has there been a da Vinci reference in this series? I haven't noticed one yet.) We also get a lot of random callbacks, which I enjoyed because it fits the tone of the series. Who would have thought a key plot point in this trilogy would reference Keith DeCandido's The Brave and the Bold duology!? Or that there'd a passing reference to The Janus Gate trilogy of all things!?! (Had that ever even been referenced by another "novelverse" book before?) (The thing this book needed, though, to really complete the vibe was comic book–style footnotes explaining this references. Those parts should have had a note at the bottom of the page attributed to "Editing Ed" or something.)

My big complaint is that if this book is our last chance to see the novels' Admiral Riker—and especially, the novels' version of the Titan—I'm pretty disappointed with the choice to go with a "Riker is crazy and has to hunt Picard" subplot. Not only did we (as the book itself points out) do this quite recently in Takedown,* but it means we can't really get any POV scenes from any Titan characters, as it would lampshade how little sense it makes that they're all going along with Riker's plan. Disappointing, given how 1) Titan was one of my favorite novel-original concepts, and 2) Swallow is typically very good at writing the Titan crew.

Longtime readers know of my dislike of the novels' version of the mirror universe, so the end of this book has me worried, but on its own, this was about as good an installment as I could have hoped for.

Continuity Notes:

• Because of the way the novels have jumped around in time, you end up with weirdness like Rugiero being Sisko's first officer for (arguably) longer than Kira was. You'll never make me believe it.
• Here we learn Tom Paris is on Akaar's staff. Tom was in Moments Asunder, but I thought just because he had experience with this kind of malarkey thanks to "Year of Hell"; if he was working for Akaar there too, I missed it.
• Here we learn what nickname Wesley has for his half-brother René. Was this preestablished? I can't remember any meaningful interactions between the two in earlier books, but perhaps it was in Cold Equations.
• There is a dog on Picard's vineyard (c.f., Picard season one). It's funny, because I think of the "novelverse" as so separate from the modern shows, it was quite jarring every time there was an explicit reference to them: for example, that Boreth is a source of time crystals (as seen in Discovery). The most effective one is probably when you realize part of Riker's motivation is this feeling that he ought to have two kids and live in a cabin in the wilderness (Picard: "Nepenthe"); I wish the book had leaned into that more, it could have made evil Riker work.
• Given how many books were referenced here, it struck me as quite pointed that the book makes sure to establish that Saavik and Spock are good friends and great colleagues and no more, contradicting Vulcan's Heart and Vulcan's Soul, even though those books have been previously referenced by other Destiny-era books.
• Alexander and Spock previously met (for some reason) in the Prometheus trilogy. I didn't detect any reference to that here, but I also didn't notice any explicit indication they hadn't met; their first meeting here seems to be between scenes.
• When did Odo resume being constable on DS9? Is this something that happened in another book that I forgot about?
• Look, the Andorian transporter duplicates were dumb. I appreciate this book wrapped that plotline offhandedly, but it should have done so in a way that made it clear what a dumb plotline that was to begin with.
• I didn't buy how little Picard seemed to know about Bashir (p. 287). Surely there was a lot of information on him in the Section 31 files released at the end of Control, and surely Picard would have read all about him!
• Counselor Hegol dies in book I of Coda but pops up here. Whoops.

Other Notes:

• Why is the adjutant of the Federation ambassador to the Klingons a Klingon? That didn't make any sense to me.
• At the beginning of the book, a former disciple of Admiral Dougherty (from Insurrection) gets a lot of setup, but I don't really know why, because he promptly vanishes from the story in favor of the "evil Riker" approach.
• There is a Nick Locarno joke here. James Swallow beat Lower Decks to the punch!
• Jake calls Rebecca his "stepsister" (p. 151), but that's wrong, she's a half-sister.
• Endalla being destroyed in gory detail without a single reference to the "what's up with Endalla" plotline that ran interminably through DRG3's DS9 novels just feels like trolling.
• Does every James Swallow Star Trek novel have a bit where someone says "down and safe" after beaming?

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: Coda: Oblivion's Gate by David Mack

* Funny moment: Riker points out Picard gets possessed a lot; Vale retaliates that so does Riker.

Michel Faber, The Book of Strange New Things (2014)

I received this book for Christmas from LibraryThing's Secret Santa program and, as is my usual practice with such books, tried to go into it with as little foreknowledge as possible; in this case, all I knew about The Book of Strange New Things was that it was science fiction.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Originally published: 2014
Acquired: December 2025
Read: April 2026

This is definitely one of those sf books written by a "literary" author, as opposed to a "genre" author, yet it also seemed to me that it was in dialogue with the genre of science fiction, specifically that subgenre of science fiction about missionaries going to alien planets: James Blish's A Case of Conscience (1958), Dan Simmons's Hyperion (1989), and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow (1996). Unlike those, though, the protagonist of this book, Peter Leigh, is not Catholic—he's a convert to Protestantism and a married one at that. I thought this was interesting, because all of those predecessor books I can think of are not only about Catholics, but specifically Jesuits, one of the most intellectual of the Catholic traditions. Peter comes at his faith from a very different direction, with the emotional fervency of the late-life convert (very much not, in my experience, a Catholic trope). His love for Jesus is bound up in his love for his wife. It's a different perspective on faith than I'm used to (as an atheist that grew up Catholic), and I found it interesting—sometimes Peter and his wife are so damn earnest I found them annoying, but never not real.

Like a lot of fiction, it's also about what Elaine Scarry calls "the difficulty of imagining other people": Peter struggles to empathize with his wife, and his wife struggles to empathize with him, over such a long distance, and in such different contexts. And this difficulty is also what's driving a social collapse on Earth, which felt all too real. 

I found the book kind of nerve-wracking, in that everything in it is vaguely off-putting—the environment Peter finds himself in, the actions of the people on the settlement, the enthusiasm of the aliens for Christ, Peter's own decision-making. You know bad things are coming, but are completely sucked along in it. The final reveal about what the aliens are interested in is very well done.

Vincent Shandor, Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century (1997)

Carpatho-Ukraine is a region bordering Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania, populated by members of all those ethnicities, not to mention the Ruthenians. Over the years, it has been annexed and abandoned by various powers. I forget how I first heard about it, but back in 2013, I got interested in it and read Republic for a Day, a book by a British journalist who was present during its short-lived status as its own nation: after Czechoslovakia broke up in 1939, it declared itself an independent republic, but only days later, it was annexed by Nazi-backed Hungary. Several years later, I read The Lost Embassy, a novel that fictionalizes these events.

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century: A Political and Legal History by Vincent Shandor

Published: 1997
Read: March 2026

Carpatho-Ukraine in the Twentieth Century is a more serious work than both of those, the work of a leading scholar of Carpatho-Ukraine who was a key figure in local politics during the 1930s. The book is published by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute, and thus very much aimed at scholars—if you're looking at a book providing a general, accessible history of the region, this is not it, nor does it intend to be it. Shandor assumes you know a lot! Unfortunately, an accessible history of Carpatho-Ukraine has never been written in English as far as I can tell, so this is what you've got to work with.

I found that Shandor is one of those scholars who gives you a lot of details, but it's sometimes hard to extract the narrative. Occasionally, he's obviously trying to settle scores against other people from the time of the events he chronicles—still, this clearly comes from a place of deep passion for the region and its people, and that resonates through its pages.

This gives the kind of context and scope you just don't get from Republic for a Day. I finished the book with a much clearer understanding of how Carpatho-Ukraine related to the other countries around it, and how it got tangled up in their political games and false promises.

Note that the book's title claims to cover "the twentieth century," but it really pretty much stops at 1945, I think because that's when Carpatho-Ukraine was absorbed into the USSR, and Shandor (I am pretty sure) was never able to go back after that. The book was published in 1997, but he lived until 2003; I hope he was able to reconnect with his homeland. 

Daniel Mason, North Woods (2023)

North Woods by Daniel Mason

Published: 2023
Acquired: June 2025
Read: June 2026

Last summer, I participated in our local library's summer reading program; I got a pick of several books as a prize for participating, and I semi-arbitrarily picked this one knowing nothing about it.

North Woods chronicles the happenings in a forest in New England, from the time of the Puritans up to the present day. It's more of a story cycle than a novel, alternating stories told by a narrator and ones that are found documents like diaries or magazine articles. Over time, you realize there are links between the stories.

It's the kind of book I find more intellectually admirable than emotionally enjoyable. Well written, but in an austere, this-guy-went-to-an-MFA-program kind of way (I have no idea if he did or not, by the way). Some strong individual stories, some forgettable ones. Unfortunately, I think one wants a story cycle to be greater than the sum of its parts and this one is probably less. I don't have any real complaints about it, but I struggle to imagine myself recommending it to someone either.

Steven L. Peck, A Short Stay in Hell (2012)

I presented at a conference back in March about my idea of the "epistemic crisis" in science fiction. Specifically, I focused on stories where your understanding of how the world works is doubly upended, such as (though it's not actually sf) Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Afterwards, a member of the audience came up to me (I do not remember his name, alas) and suggested that I read a novella, Steven Peck's A Short Stay in Hell. He said it was an example of what I call an epistemic crisis happening not just once or twice, but repeatedly throughout the book. When I got home, I requested it from my local library.

I was quite surprised to realize that even though the book is over a decade old, it was in heavy demand. The library had just two physical copies, but I was fifteenth in line for them; the library had eight e-copies... but I was forty-fifth in line for them! This is the kind of demand typically reserved for brand-new books by popular authors. Why would this be happening to a book that came back in 2012?

The answer turns out to be that, I guess, it became "BookTok" and "BookTube" famous, receiving lots of positive interest there. Probably this is how my conference interlocutor came across it himself. Take a look at the book's popularity curve on LibraryThing:

Most books, of course, have an initial burst of interest when they are released and then go down over time. A Short Stay in Hell, on the other hand, began to take off in 2023 and has only continued to get more popular since! That I even got the book as quickly as I did (it took two months for my hold to come in) was because the library ordered three more copies.

A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck

Published: 2012
Read: June 2026

Anyway, what is the book actually about? It's a riff on Borges's "The Library of Babel," a story I have not actually read, about a library that contains every possible book, in the sense that the library is filled with books that contain every possible combination of random characters. So the vast majority of the books in the library are random nonsense, but through the vagaries of randomness, every book that exists in the real world is going to appear exactly once... along with books that are quite close to them but slightly different, and book that are mostly nonsense but contain a couple lucid sentences.

The narrator of A Short Stay is a devout Mormon who dies of cancer... and discovers that actually Zoroastianism is the one true religion. Whoops. Thus, he is (like most people) condemned to Hell. But Hell isn't an eternal punishment, you can redeem yourself and go to Heaven. For him and many others (it's indicated Hell can be different for different people), Hell is the library of Borges's story. The key to getting out is finding the book of your life story and inserting it into a slot.

I disagree with my conference interlocutor: I don't think this is an example of repeated epistemic crises. Once you have this basic premise explained to you, everything flows quite logically from it, and it is never upended. But that makes it, in fact, an example of a different but related phenomenon that interests me in sf: the fantasy story that starts from a logical impossibility but then thinks through all of its implications as logically as possible. If you could have a library like this, how big would it be? And, thus, what would the people trapped in it do? This is what Peck works out, through the vehicle of this story.

There's a pleasure to this, which China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation." It's the joy of a certain kind of fantasy. I reckon that Ann Leckie is a very good example of how to do this, in her stories from the world of Raven Tower, but also you see it in places like Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon," T. H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose, and even L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It's just enjoyable to follow along with the author as they extrapolate from their basic premise... even if, as it is in A Short Stay, quite horrific!

This is a short book, and it's mostly given over to thinking through different aspects of what such a "Hell" might look like. What would the people in such an environment do, what kind of societies would spring up, what kind of implications would the sheer size of such a structure have? We get lots of cool stuff like the protagonist throwing himself off the structure and falling for an interminably long time—but then how would he stop himself?

The end of the book indicates he exists for billions of years in the library... but if you go back to the beginning, it's mentioned that the book you are reading is one he finds within the library, so if he inserts it into the slot, he'll finally get out and go to Heaven.

Except... we're told the book of your life story has to be free of typos, and I found at least two: on pp. 6 and 10, questions in dialogue are followed by capital letters when they should be lowercase ("One of the women whispered hoarsely" and "He said looking..."). So is he doomed to keep looking for the error-free version of his story for billions more years?

One last thing: the narrator is Mormon, like author Steven Peck. But so too are the two people who provide back cover blurbs: science fiction author Dan Wells and Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings. Is there a Mormon book-blurb-providing exchange?

The Maze Agency: "A Beautiful Crime" and Other Stories by Mike W. Barr, Ariel Padilla, Ernest Jocson, et al.

Almost a decade after its first revival (see item #3 on the list below), Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency was revived again, for a second three-issue miniseries, this time from IDW. (The revival was accompanied by a new collection of volume 1's first five issues, see item #1 below; I have also seen some evidence that ISBNs were assigned for more collections, but none of those were ever published.)

I found these three issues more of a mixed bag than the previous revival from Caliber. I think there were two reasons: one avoidable, and one perhaps unavoidable.

First, the avoidable one. I didn't find any of the stories among these three as well put together as the ones in the previous two runs of The Maze Agency. Maze Agency stories were always complicated, sure—I imagine there's very rarely a fair-play whodunit that isn't—but these usually verged into overcomplicated. The reader might very often lose track of things... but probably the one thing that should never happen in a whodunit is that the reader loses track of the suspects. But in all of these stories, especially the first and the third, I found that was exactly was what happened. Two many characters, and when the murderer was revealed, I wasn't quite sure I remembered who they were.

Probably part of the problem there is not the writing, but the art: the IDW stories are all penciled by Ariel Padilla, and I didn't think he had the command of making unique faces necessary to pulling off the complex character work of a murder mystery. Sure, not everyone can be Adam Hughes, but almost all of his many replacements in the original run still managed to do it. The glossy mid-2000s coloring techniques probably don't help either. In particular, issues #2 and 3 have lots of characters—beauty pageant participants and two distinct Japanese families, respectively—and if you can't tell them all apart, you'll very quickly be lost. I wish a stronger artist had been found to bring back The Maze Agency.

from The Maze Agency vol. 3 #2

The other reason, though, was probably unavoidable. The pleasure of the original Maze Agency wasn't just the whodunits, it was being with Jen and Gabe as their relationship evolved and developed. The series moved forward in real time; its two years of comics covered two years of their lives.

Volume 3 of The Maze Agency was published fifteen years after the last issue of volume 1...  yet the characters have clearly not aged fifteen years. Nor, however, are we picking up shortly after where we left off; these are not early 1990s period pieces, either. In true "comic book time" fashion, the fashions and the technology indicate this is the mid-2000s, but Jen and Gabe are where we left them. Or, even worse, regressed a little: one of the stories indicates Gabe has his own apartment, but he actually moved in with Jen during the original run. There probably was not a good solution to this dilemma, but I find it disappointing nonetheless. (I think, though, I would have done what Sue Grafton did in the Kinsey Millhone books partway though, and transformed them into period pieces. For one thing, the fashions of the late 1980s and early 1990s are much better than the generic mid-2000s stuff Jen is wearing here. She even lost her forelock!)

from The Maze Agency vol. 3 #3

What I think of as the "modern" revival of The Maze Agency actually isn't all that modern—depressingly, it's closer to the series's original run than it is to the present! However, there was one last Maze Agency revival just a couple years ago, from Scout Comics... which lasted just one issue! I was able to find a press release about the Scout revival but no interviews or anything; certainly, the fanfare with which it was announced seems to indicate it wasn't planned as a one-shot, but no further issues were solicited or anything.

Anyway, it's fine. The twists of the mystery are interesting enough, and there are some good bits of humor in it. Unfortunately, it's let down by the art: all of Silvano Beltramo's women basically have the same face, and he's also the colorist, and occasionally gives Jen reddish-blond hair (matching one of the suspects) instead of blond, so I often had to reread dialogue to figure out which woman was Jen! I do appreciate they got Alan Davis back to do one of the covers; I think it was originally a 1:5 incentive cover, but it wasn't any more expensive than the regular cover online.

from The Maze Agency vol. 4 #1

The Scout Comics one-shot seems to be it for The Maze Agency; I believe it was Mike Barr's last-ever published comics work, and he's now having health problems, alas. If you liked the core series, these later revivals don't quite recapture its glory days, but are still worth tracking down.

Volume 3 of The Maze Agency originally appeared in three issues, from Nov. 2005 to Jan. 2006. The stories were written by Mike W. Barr, penciled by Ariel Padilla, inked by Ernest Jocson (#1-2) and Michael Jason Paz (#3), lettered by Tom B. Long, colored by Rainier Beredo (#1, 3) and Romulo Fajardo Jr. (#2), and edited by Dan Taylor.

"Shriek: The Sequel!" originally appeared in issue #1 of The Maze Agency vol. 4 (Dec. 2023). The story was written by Mike W. Barr, illustrated and colored by Silvano Beltramo, lettered by Tyler Smith, and edited by Andrea Lorenzo Molinari.

This is the penultimate in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers the short stories. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)
2. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #6-23 (1989-91)
3. The Maze Agency vol. 2 #1-3 (1997-98)

Batgirl: Year One by Scott Beatty & Chuck Dixon, Marcos Martin, and Alvaro Lopez

Batgirl: Year One: The Deluxe Edition

Collection published: 2019
Contents originally published: 2003
Acquired: July 2025 
Read: March 2026

Writers: Scott Beatty & Chuck Dixon
Penciller: Marcos Martin
Inker: Alvaro Lopez
Colorist: Javier Rodriguez
Letterer: Willie Schubert

Maybe I've been spending too much time on Reddit's "Omnibus Collectors" sub, but recently I've been tracking down nice deluxe editions of classic DC storylines. On a very flimsy pretext, I purchased JLA: Year One; I also added a couple others to my wishlist, and I received this as a birthday present, the deluxe edition of Batgirl: Year One, which I borrowed from the library over a decade ago.

The original "Year One" was of course Batman: Year One, justly a classic, which established a "post-Crisis" origin for Batman. DC returned to this concept many different times and ways over the years; for example, in 1995, every DCU title's annual was a "Year One" story. One briefly common approach was the "Year One" miniseries: there were a whole spate of these in the 2000s, giving post-Crisis origins for characters like Robin, Green Arrow, Metamorpho, and the Huntress. I haven't enjoyed every one that I've read, but when they work, they really work: usually DC handed the reigns over to a high-profile creative team and got them to do good work in a timeless tale that stands alone. (And, of course, the post-Crisis pre-Flashpoint iteration of the DC universe is the best one, i.e., it's the one that was in effect when I got into superhero comics.)  

There's a nicely done subplot about how Commissioner Gordon knows Barbara is Batgirl... but just can't admit it to himself.
from Batgirl: Year One #9

Batgirl: Year One is no exception to this. Chuck Dixon isn't my favorite scripter, but he was everywhere on the Batman books in the 2000s, including Birds of Prey, so he was a good choice for Barbara Gordon's origin; outside of Robin and Nightwing: Year One, I'm less familiar with co-writer Scott Beatty's work, but he has done some very solid, very fun Batman-adjacent standalones, like the team-up with Elongated Man in Gotham Knights. And the quality work of Marcos Martin and Alvaro Lopez on this book is indisputable; they both seem like the kinds of illustrators who ought to have done more comics than they have. Their work here is slick and bold and stylized, full of energy that perfectly communicates the attitude of Barbara Gordon at this point in her life and superheroic career. The colors of Javier Rodriguez are excellent, too, bright and energetic.

Maybe I shouldn't be wasting one of my two images from Batgirl: Year One on a totally different character, but I can never say no to Dinah Laurel Lance.
from Batgirl: Year One #7

I don't think this is a great work of art. To be honest, I think the plot is unnecessarily confusing, and parts of it are a bit belabored. But what better "Year One" story could there be for Barbara Gordon? This is perfect bubblegum comics.

The Maze Agency: "The Death of Justice Girl" and Other Stories by Mike W. Barr, Gene Gonzales, et al.

Mike Barr's "fair-play whodunit" comic series The Maze Agency (see my two posts linked below for more detail on its original run) has been revived several times since the end of its original run in 1991. The first of these revivals was a three-issue black-and-white miniseries from indie publisher Caliber Comics in the late 1990s. Picking up the first two of these isn't that hard, but the third issue often goes for silly money on the secondary market—I think because Adam Hughes drew one its two covers, though even the cover he didn't draw can still go for a lot for some reason. (Automated bot pricing?) Thankfully MyComicShop posted a $3 copy of the non-Hughes cover while I was engaged in some futile eBay bidding. (Like, it wasn't there when I started looking for it, hence me going to eBay to begin with, but then I went back a few days later and it was!)

The Caliber run consists of three done-in-one murder mysteries, of course: in #1, Jen and Gabe investigate the death of the actress who played Justice Girl decades ago in a film; in #2, they travel to a Catholic monastery to locate a vital witness for a mob case, and in #3, they are confounded when three different women all turn up claiming to be a model who hasn't been seen in public for decades. They are all solid mysteries of the type Barr perfected in the original Maze Agency run, though I found all the characters and clues in #3 (each potential model also has associated side characters) hard to keep track of. On the other hand, I liked #2 a lot; a large cast of suspects, but they are distinctive, so you can keep track of them all fairly easily, and some nice twists.

from The Maze Agency vol. 2 #2

I'm assuming running the series in black and white was a cost-cutting decision, not an artistic one. Certainly, issues #1 and 3 seem to have been drawn much as anyone would draw a color comic. However, issue #2 feels like it was designed to run in black and white: lots of shadows in the monastery, lots of dark brickwork. Overall, I found it moody and effective. If someone (hypothetically) created a Maze Agency Omnibus, I'd probably want to see issues #1 and 3 colored, but I think coloring #2 would diminish its effect.

Overall, Gene Gonzales is an effective penciller, capturing the likenesses of our leads; he does the first two issues and the first half of the third. Unfortunately, the second half of #3 is done by a different artist with a style that seems both rushed and inappropriately cartoony... and having your characters change physical appearance halfway through an issue is especially detrimental to a murder mystery!

Volume 2 of The Maze Agency originally appeared in three issues, from July 1997 to Apr. 1998.* The stories were written by Mike W. Barr; pencilled by Gene Gonzales (#1-3) and James Bible (#3); inked by David Rowe (#1), Ande Parks (#2), Jason Baumgartner (#2-3), and Larry Shuput (#3); and edited by Joe Pruett (#1-3) and James Pruett (#3).

This is the antepenultimate in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers volumes 3 and 4 from IDW and Scout. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)
2. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #6-23 (1989-91) 

* The indicia dates on issues #2 and 3 are both just "1998," no month given. Some Internet sources give the months as Jan. and Feb. 1998, respectively, but I think this is just arbitrarily placing the issues in the two earliest slots in 1998. John Jackson Miller's Comichron includes issues #2 and 3 on his sales charts for Feb. and Apr. 1998, and given that issue #1 appears on the sales chart for July 1997, we can infer that Caliber was one of those publishers where the indicia date matches the sales month.

The Penguin History of Britain #2: The Anglo-Saxon Period (A.D. 400–1070)

In chronological order, this is the second volume of the Penguin History of Britain, covering the period from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest. The predecessor to this series, the Pelican History of England, positioned itself as "social histories," eschewing kings and battles and dates in favor of giving the reader a sense of how society itself changed over time. Or, at least, that was the theory; I think many of the writers struggled with the concept in practice, and I certainly did as a reader. Often it felt like you weren't really getting a story, but instead a snapshot, if you see the distinction. For example, though I did like that series's volume 2, it didn't really capture how England evolved from the Roman withdrawal to the Norman Conquest, it just told you what it was like overall. Some writers did quite badly with this approach, though others made it work quite well.

I am not sure if the Penguin History of Britain shared this aspect of the premise of the Pelican History of England or not; the "inviolable rules" from the series editor that author Robin Fleming mentions in her introduction are just 1) no footnotes, 2) no historiography, and 3) keep it accessible (xxii). But even if not, it did seem to me that in this volume, Fleming was attempting to write a social history, be it an editorial mandate or not, along the lines of her predecessors: "the founding contention of this book is that the aggregate of the actions, beliefs and tribulations of whole generations of individuals shaped lives and changed societies in very profound ways...; indeed, they did so more fundamentally than the actions of people whose names we happen to know" (xx). Later, she points out that naturally later writers would have fallen into this trap, "because high politics consumed men writing in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, and naturally modern historians have come to share the concerns of our writers of texts" (314). 

As I said, the mixed results of the Pelican History suggests that this can be a tricky thing to accomplish. Even though I enjoyed its volume 2, it didn't really tell a story; some of the series's more successful volumes seemed to accomplish the goal of telling a story mostly by abandoning the goal of sticking to society itself. So, I had little evidence you could cover society and tell a good story!

Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400–1070
by Robin Fleming

Originally published: 2010
Read: April 2026

Well, Fleming gives me some very strong evidence, because I found that Britain after Rome succeeded at exactly what it set out to accomplish. There is indeed little of (what in his introduction to volume 4 of the Pelican Histories, A. R. Myers called) "dates and kings and battles." But that doesn't mean Fleming fails to tell a story; she does an excellent job of giving you a sense of how Britain changed over this period.

Her major thesis seems to be that while we think of the Angles and Saxons as invading and conquering Britain during this time period, there's little evidence of that from the actual period in question, and much more evidence that they settled in Britain and were gradually integrated culturally and societally. Like Dorothy Whitelock in the Pelican History's volume 2, Fleming is interested in the economic power of kings, but unlike Whitelock, she gives you a sense of how that power evolved over time: "Although it is clear that kings were not the founders of England's early towns, it is nonetheless certain that the fates of towns and kings were inextricably linked, because, although kings had not made towns, towns... were beginning to remake England's more formidable kings" (205). She goes on to describe how kings came to realize you could get much more from controlling and taxing town economies than you ever could from warfare (212).

Fleming uses archaeological evidence to push against the political tendencies of earlier writers, but unlike the first volumes of either the Pelican History or the Penguin one, she is able to use this evidence to tell a story, so it does not feel like you are just getting a succession of descriptions of places: "It is only when we look at the statistics provided by the bones of the early medieval dead that we come face to face with just how dire life in this period was; how sick, how sad and how short.... Narrative sources... do not allow us to see the leg ulcers that plagued so many; the swarms of disease-carrying flies; the constant discomfort caused by a gut full of parasites; the scrawny, undersized 14-year-old boys. Yet these were fundamental, bodily aspects of people's lives in early medieval Britain" (365). It's very well done stuff, and overall, I found this highly enjoyable reading.

"Meet Jennifer Mays, New York's prettiest detective, and Gabriel Webb, amateur sleuth and true crime writer, in another fair-play whodunit -- challenging you to solve the mystery as it unfolds!": The Maze Agency #6–23

The first four or five issues of The Maze Agency have been collected two or three times, by my reckoning. However, the original series ran twenty-three issues plus an annual and a special, and aside from one story from the annual and one from the special, none of that material has ever been collected. But it is all available on the secondary market for pretty reasonable prices.

Interestingly, the series was cancelled by publisher Comico after June 1989's issue #7, but the series was picked up by Innovation Comics... even continuing the numbering with December 1989's issue #8! (Issue #8 credits Comico editor Michael Eury, so I'd guess the issue was originally prepared for them.) If you're trying to read it all in order, note that special #1 was published between issues #12 and 13, and annual #1 between issues #15 and 16. It is very clear that the comic struggled in the comics market of the 1980s and '90s; it had acclaim, but never a wide audience. (It probably doesn't help that once Adam Hughes gets snapped up to draw JLA, the series never really has a regular penciller again; Hughes draws #8, 9, and 12; the other fifteen issues of the regular series feature eleven different pencillers.)

If you've read the first five issues, how these ones unfold won't be a big surprise to you: every issue features a done-in-one murder mystery when Jen and Gabe solve the crime. Supposedly they are all "fair-play whodunits," meaning the reader can look at all the clues and solve the mystery too. I didn't really attempt to do this because, though I enjoy reading them, I am not "good" at murder mysteries. Only one time, with issue #11's "…Twas the Crime Before Christmas…" (pencils by Robb Phipps), did I even come close, thanks to a very obvious clue about color blindness. In some stories, the explanations can get pretty convoluted, but that's all part of the genre in my experience; you've just got to roll with it. (I found #9's "The English Channeler Mystery: A Problem In Deduction" particularly far-fetched; I must not have been the only one, because someone actually writes into the lettercol with a completely different solution, claiming it fits all the facts, though writer Mike Barr disagrees. I also thought the "clues" in the one about a group of authors being murdered, #16's "If Books Could Kill…", beggared belief, though all the book stuff was quite fun.)

But when it hits, it hits. These are almost never not pleasurable in the way that murder mysteries ought to be pleasurable: fun characters, including some engaging cops for our leads to interact with, enjoyable pulling together of threads and ideas. I particularly enjoyed the aforementioned Christmas story in #11; the one where Jen's police ally herself becomes a suspect, #15's "Too Much Bliss" (art by Mike Okamoto, Mike Witherby, and Rick Magyar); and the one about a homophobic serial killer, #21's "Valentine's Slay." Surely the best of all, though, was issue #14's "Before Midnight" (pencils by Robb Phipps), where a death-row inmate who Jen helped put away is murdered just before his execution. Really tense and clever and well put together.

And though, as I said, the series never regains a regular penciller, there's still some solid artwork across these issues. I particularly liked Mary Mitchell's pencils on issues #16 and 21. (Alas, it doesn't seem like she had much of a subsequent career; her last credited work on League of Comic Geeks is a ten-page story in Marvel Valentine Special #1 from 1997.) I was also pleased to see some early-career work from Rob Davis on #19, who went on to do some excellent art and writing for Doctor Who Magazine from 2007 to 2011. Rick Magyar does most of the inks from issue #8 to 14, which helps maintain consistency, and he's definitely good value.

I only have two real complaints about this run. The first is that it stretches credulity for me when people investigate murders professionally just happen to encounter a murder mystery. I get this is a feature of the genre, but it gets overused a bit: in #6, Jen and Gabe go on vacation and encounter a murder, then in #7, they go to visit Jen's parents and encounter a murder, and then in #8 there's a murder in Gabe's apartment building. Quite a run there! Similarly, issues #16, 17, and 19 all feature murders they just happen to bump into, rather than ones Jen is hired to solve. It's a device that needs to be used more sparingly.

The other is that I felt like in the earlier issues Barr was setting up some stuff about how the two of them met that never gets paid off. A lot of the early issues revolve around Gabe wanted more of a relationship while Jen is reluctant, and I really enjoyed seeming them slowly grow closer together. But it seemed like the early issues implied there was a bit of a story there, and we never get to hear it. Also there's a lot of focus on Jen's family... but what about Gabe's? (Maybe I just wanted a story set in Ohio.)

The special and the annual are also good stuff. Special #1 sees Jen and Gabe solve three murders in one day, each one drawn by a different artist. I particularly liked the one based around Jen's haircut, "Afternoon: Murder by a Hair," one of the only times Rick Magyar provides pencils. Annual #1 is mostly a Spirit tribute (art by Rick Magyar, Darick Robertson, & Wm. Messner-Loebs); I haven't read any Spirit, but the stylistic diversion is enjoyable. 

All that said... if you like well-constructed comics and fun characters, this is definitely a highlight of the medium and the genre. It's a shame no one has ever crowdfunded some kind of definitive omnibus collection, but they're worth tracking down for sure. 

This is the second in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers volume 2 from Caliber. Previous installments are listed below:

1. The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1-5 (1988-90)

Star Trek: Return to the Taurus Reach: Vanguard, Books 4 & 5

I am quite behind on my book reviews, so my original plan was to review the first three Star Trek: Vanguard books here on my blog when I reread them because I had never reviewed them before (they predate my bookbloogging; I do feel like I reviewed book one on the TrekBBS when it came out, but if so, I can't find the post). However, I reviewed books four and five on my old LiveJournal back in the day, so I figured I would repost those reviews here as a way of quickly catching up on my reviews...

...but then when it came time to do that, I found that I just had too many thoughts! So I will repost those old reviews, but also I am going to expand those thoughts. Just as I felt the first three books worked as a single unit, so do books four and five: between them, they tie off a number of the character and plot threads set up in the first two books, especially as regards Reyes, T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn.

Of book four, Open Secrets, I originally wrote this:

The Vanguard series continues from the cliffhanger at the end of Reap the Whirlwind, and that plotline was probably my favorite of the many strands running throughout this book. Though Commodore Reyes seemed less than active in his own defense, I feel that despite (or because of) that we learned more about him in this one book than in the previous three. The other plotlines continue to chug along, perturbed by the events of the Federation-Klingon War (as seen in "Errand of Mercy") but otherwise not incredibly remarkable, with the exception of the Pennington/T'Prynn story, which added another interesting layer to my favorite journalist. I'm never quite sure what to think of Vanguard, but I'll certainly be continuing along to Precipice. 

Rereading it over fifteen years later, I feel differently about the Reyes plotline; I think this is because the events of books one through three are fresh in my memory, since I read them months instead of years prior. When I reread the first three books, particularly book one, Harbinger, it was very clear to me that these books were commenting on the post-9/11 security state through a science fiction lens much in the same way that, say, the Battlestar Galactica reboot did. Here, Reyes goes on trial for what he's done... but in a nice twist, not for the unethical things he did, but for the one ethical thing he did, allow Pennington to reveal the truth. I like this idea, but in the end, I feel like—just as was true of the earlier books—we don't get much insight into why Reyes ultimately did what he did, what made these decisions feel compelling to him to begin with. Why was he willing to sacrifice innocent lives and civil rights on the altar of Federation security and state secrets? I honestly still don't really know after reading four books about this guy. (I do finally know why T'Prynn was willing to do this, but we'll discuss that when I get to book five.)

Star Trek: Vanguard: Open Secrets
by Dayton Ward

Published: 2009
Acquired: May 2009
Previously read: June 2009
Reread: April 2026

Outside of the trial, I unfortunately found the book pretty dramatically inert. The book begins with a flash-forward to what was happening on Vanguard during the events of the original series episode "Errand of Mercy"—the Klingons are approaching Vanguard, but as seen in that episode, suddenly both sides' controls get too hot to use and the Organians unliterally end the war. This scene is set in 2267, and then we jump back a year and fill in what got us up to this point. This does the exact opposite of open the book with an exciting tease, unfortunately, as whenever the Klingons are up to something in the rest of the book, the reader knows it's ultimately going to go nowhere because of something that happened in an episode from 1967. I mean, the reader might know this anyway, but we don't need to remind them!

Similar choices dog other aspects of the station narrative. Reyes is replaced as commander of Vanguard Station by Admiral Nogura. Nogura was only mentioned on screen twice, in Star Trek: The Motion Picture where he's Kirk's superior, but to fans of a certain age, he's a well-known figure, thanks to his presence in the 1980s novels. Especially in J. M. Dillard's The Lost Years, where he's called "the Old Man," a revered figure known for how hard he was; he comes out of retirement to take over Starfleet and clean it up following a series of scandals in the novels Dreadnought! and Battlestations! When it was announced that Nogura was going to be in this book I was quite excited... but he doesn't do anything for the entire book. He makes no interesting choices. I know he's not one of the series's ostensible leads... but it also seems weird to me that when Reyes is in command of Vanguard, there are lots of hard choices that constantly need to be made, but as soon as he's not in command, basically this all dries up and Nogura spends him time sitting around in staff meetings. Why bother to use this potentially interesting character if you're not going to do anything interesting with him?

The other major station subplots are about the scientific research happening, and they are similarly devoid of interesting moments. A Tholian defects and joins the scientific operation at Vanguard, giving them valuable information on the Shedai... but the novel only considers this from the angle of the scientific plot. How does Ming Xiong feel about working alongside a representative of the people responsible for the death of a bunch of his friends back in book one? Apparently just fine. Are the station crew curious about the mysterious Tholians? I guess not. The Tholian is there to deliver exposition about the Shedai, and beyond that, no thought has been put into their role in the narrative. Also, Ming gets assigned a boss who relieves him as leader of the science investigations on the station (The Wrath of Khan's Carol Marcus), but he's just fine with it and they get along great. In the long run we'll realize that this happens for "lore" reasons (what Carol learns about the Taurus meta-genome here influences her later work on the Genesis Project), but again, it isn't really thought through in any other way. (Also I have a hard time believing that from the way her son David talks about Kirk in the movie that he actually grew up on a Starfleet base!)

Lastly, I also found the T'Prynn/Pennington subplot a damp squib, contra my comments of fifteen years ago. Basically, Pennington and M'Benga take T'Prynn back to Vulcan. Exactly why Pennington is willing to do this is pretty vague, but mostly all the characters just do nothing while a Vulcan mystic works. T'Prynn herself is fairly absent from her own plotline.

Small niggle: while in all previous books (and future books, as far as I know), Ambassador Jetanien was a Rigellian "Chelon," in this one he suddenly becomes a "Chel" for some reason.

Precipice is the fifth Vanguard novel, and the last that I kept up with as the series was released. From this point on, all the books will be new to me. At the time I originally read it, this is what I wrote:

This novel covers almost a full year in the saga of Star Trek: Vanguard, but it feels like it artificially stretches events out in order to do that; it would have been better off with a time-frame of a couple months. I'm not a big fan of the fragmented plotlines either; hopefully the next volume sees a more central focus. It's nice to see Cervantes Quinn get some solid time, even if he did inexplicably turn from Harry Mudd into Butch Coolidge.

You can see me trying to be diplomatic there, I think. This was during my brief period as a writer of Star Trek fiction, and it didn't seem the done thing to be going around slating my fellow authors' work. (I think it was shortly after this that I stopped reviewing new Star Trek books online, actually; I only resumed doing so once it was clear to me I was not going to be writing any Star Trek books ever again.)

Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice
by David Mack

Published: 2009
Acquired: January 2010
Previously read: March 2010
Reread: May 2026

Anyway, much like Open Secrets, I think some aspects of Precipice are dramatically inert. As I noted in my old review, the book, like Open Secrets, takes place over a whole year. This is done by having lots of things take lots of time to happen in ways I didn't find very convincing. Like, in the Pennington/T'Prynn plot, they have to hike somewhere, which takes forever, then they have to take a shuttle where they want to be, which takes forever, then they have to wait a long time for something to happen, which takes forever. Similarly, Ambassador Jetanien leaves the station to seek discussion with his Klingon and Romulan counterparts; though the Klingon turns up promptly, they wait almost all year for the Romulan. Does he really have nothing better to do? I just don't believe in it. There seem to be no internal reasons for all this, it's just so that the Vanguard series as a whole can fulfill its conceptual mandate of paralleling the original show.

Just as Open Secrets tied up the Reyes arc begun in book one, Precipice seemingly ties up the arcs for T'Prynn, Pennington, and Quinn. I found the T'Prynn arc wrapup particularly bad. First, the book's answer to the question of "why do people do terrible things in service to the security state?" is "mental illness"! The reason T'Prynn made all these awful choices in book one was because ongoing trauma from her failed mating bond and the presence of her deceased lover's katra (p. 240). It's about the least interesting answer I could have imagined. On top of that, there's this whole weird thing about how when T'Prynn is cured following the events of book four, she finds out Reyes is dead and decides to hunt down his killer. (Reyes isn't actually dead, but she doesn't know that yet.) Whose killer does she not decide to hunt down, or even think about? Her lover's! No, she's gotta deal with the death of her Man. Such a weird choice, like the author forgot the very thing that put her into a coma to begin with.

The wrapups for Pennington and Quinn are also quite bad. Pennington was introduced in book one as a good, if kind of cynical and obnoxious, journalist, but a bad person, having an extramarital affair. He's then sent to his lowest point thanks to T'Prynn's machinations; unbeknownst to him, his soon-to-be only friend, Quinn, helped her. In this book he delivers a speech explaining his personality defects that lead him to having this affair and now he's all better (pp. 238-9). It's very pat and it comes out of nowhere; how and when did he learn all this about himself? Certainly not in the intervening three books. I think you can do some interesting stuff with infidelity in fiction, but this series has not. Also, Pennington learning that his friend betrayed and lied to him also goes nowhere. Quinn's plotline here is even weirder; suddenly he has a previously unmentioned backstory as a principled mercenary and he's a badass commando operative. Like, where did this come from?

Continuity grumble: This book goes to great pains to work in the events of the 1980s novels The Vulcan Academy Murders and The IDIC Epidemic into its continuity. I don't know why, because I wouldn't have any expectation that those books were "in continuity" with these ones. But it does so in a way that makes absolutely no sense, setting them both before the television episode "Journey to Babel." But Vulcan Academy Murders is a sequel to "Journey to Babel," which entirely depends on the Enterprise characters' familiarity with Spock's parents, who they only met in "Babel." Weird choice.

The Maze Agency, Volume 1 by Mike W. Barr, Adam Hughes, et al.

The Maze Agency was a comic book series that originally ran from 1988 to 1991, with brief revivals in 1997, 2005, and 2024. It was emphatically not a superhero series; it was about the owner of a private detective agency, Jennifer Mays, and her boyfriend, the freelance crime writer Gabriel Webb, as they solved crimes together. The series was the brainchild of Mike W. Barr, a comics writer known for his detective-focused take on Batman—and, if you're a Star Trek fan, his exemplary run on the movie-era comics. I first learned about it, I think, from an appreciation post on the late, lamented comics blog Comics Alliance, which was surely the high point of Internet comics journalism. (This might sound sarcastic, but it's absolutely not; my consumption of contemporary comics went way down when I no longer had CA to point me towards stuff aligned with my tastes.)

Since I just don't have enough comics series to work my way through around here, with this post I'm embarking on a journey through the history of The Maze Agency. Thankfully, though, there's a lot less of it than, say, Blackhawk! 

The Maze Agency, Volume 1

Collection published: 2005
Contents originally published: 1988-90
Acquired and read: March 2026

Writer/Creator: Mike W. Barr
Pencillers: Alan Davis, Adam Hughes
Inks: Alan Davis, Rick Magyar, Al Vey
Letterers: Todd Klein, Deborah Marks, Bob Pinaha
Colorist: Julia Lacquement

The only issues of The Maze Agency to ever have been reprinted are the first five; there was a black-and-white trade paperback of the first four in 1990 from Innovation,* but in 2005, IDW rereleased the first five (plus some other stuff, which I'll come to) in color, as a companion to their revival of the series. (No further trades were ever released, not even of IDW's own material, so it must not have been a big seller, even though some sleuthing leads me to think that ISBNs were assigned to future collections.)

This is one of those comic books that's kind of hard to review, in the sense that what The Maze Agency does isn't genius... but it is perfect, if you take my meaning. That is to say, this is a comic that has an objective and it fulfills that objective with precision and professionalism. Mike Barr is an underrated writer, in my opinion; he knows (knew? I don't think he's had any new comics work released since 2024's one-issue Maze Agency revival, but I could be wrong) exactly how to put a comic book together. These issues have to pack in a lot, because each one is a single story: they need to introduce a mystery and a cast of supporting characters to go along with it to serve as victim(s) and suspects and witnesses, and provide clues and red herrings, and they also need to give Jennifer and Gabe interesting things to do. That's a lot to pack into twenty pages, but Barr manages it every time with an economy of storytelling that really impressed me. It's just pleasurable to read on a panel-to-panel basis. There is nothing flashy here, but it's efficient in the way that only a solid comics pro of the 1980s could be, in my opinion.

Aw, poor Gabe.
from The Maze Agency vol. 1 #1 (art by Adam Hughes & Rick Magyar)

The steady, experienced hand of Barr as writer is aided by the then new, upcoming hand (that's a weird metaphor, isn't it?) of Adam Hughes as artist. Hughes would go on to become a superstar of the comics industry, but this was among his first comics work if not, I think, the first. Hughes's skill rests in his ability to both draw attractive people and communicate character with facial expressions; it's little wonder he was later poached from this series to illustrate Justice League America, a series equally suited to his talents. (Fun fact: Hughes drew the Maze Agency characters in a cameo in JLA #34, and when Barr found out, he got DC to let him write some dialogue for their appearance!)

Or maybe, Poor Jen!
from The Maze Agency vol. 1 #3 (art by Adam Hughes & Rick Magyar)

Like I said, this volume collects five regular issues of the series. In these five, Jen and Gabe deal with murders in the contexts of an art gallery heist, the discovery of lost sitcom episodes, a facility for testing experimental cars, a group of Jack the Ripper enthusiasts, and an Alcor-like cryonics facility. I found them all enjoyable, solid, well-constructed mysteries. Like any mystery series, though, it's not just about the murders, but also the detectives. The other pleasure of the series is the developing relationship between the leads, as well as their interaction with the supporting cast. We're not told exactly how Jen and Gabe met or got involved with each other, but their relationship is clearly quite recently established when the series begins, and Gabe is eager while Jen is hesitant. They're fun characters, and using Adam Hughes as artist is key to the series's success here: just as a solid mystery tv show is elevated by the chemistry of its cast, so is this comic elevated by Hughes's ability to depict character through his art.

Awwwww...
from The Maze Agency vol. 1 #4 (art by Adam Hughes & Rick Magyar)

When trying to figure out what issues of this series I needed to buy in addition to the TPB, I was stymied by finding contradictory information about this collected edition. Some references said it contained the first five issues plus Maze Agency Annual #1, others said it contained the first five issues plus Maze Agency Special #1. I had to wait for my copy to arrive to solve this mystery. So which was it? Well, it was both and neither. The IDW trade paperback contains one story from annual #1 and one story from special #1... but both of those issues contained other stories as well, so if you want the complete Maze Agency, you'll have to buy both of those issues even if you already own this collection.

In a text piece in the full Maze Agency Special, Mike Barr says it was Alan Davis who gave Jen her little forelock, and he was initially opposed to it but came to like it in the end.
from The Maze Agency Special #1 (art by Alan Davis)

The story from 1990's special #1 is "The Mile-High Corpse!" (here listed as being from Maze Agency #0, which isn't quite accurate). This story was written by Barr with illustrations by comics legend Alan Davis, and though it wasn't printed until much later, it was completed first—Barr used it to try to convince potential publishers to try to get on board with publishing the series. It's just six pages long, so the mystery can't be very complicated, but it gives you a very brief understanding of the premise, and of course it's always a pleasure to see some Alan Davis art.

This actually goes on to be a significant recurring gag in the comic.
from The Maze Agency Annual #1 (art by Adam T. Hughes & Rick Magyar)

The story from annual #1 is even shorter, just three pages. "Murder in Mint Condition" is about Jen and Gabe very quickly solving a mystery at a comics convention... because the first two pages were given away for free at a comics convention in 1988. You could submit your solution; the last page, with the actual solution, was later printed in the Comics Buyer's Guide. The complete story was eventually reprinted in both the annual for 1990 and the original trade paperback. Not really a satisfying mystery but a nice curio.

This is the first in a series of posts about Mike W. Barr's The Maze Agency. The next covers issues #6-23 of volume 1.

* According to Mike Barr's text page in The Maze Agency vol. 2 #1, Caliber also put out a trade of the first four issues in 1997, but I can't find any evidence this actually happened: it's not on the GCD, it's not listed for sale anywhere, or ever having been for sale.