Somehow I have managed to forget to enthuse about Roger Gibson and Vince Danks’ excellent comic, Harker, before now. I need to remedy that forthwith.

Not all comics contain super heroes. Indeed, not all of them have any speculative elements at all. Harker is a straight-up police procedural. It features the rumpled, chain-smoking investigative genius, Detective Inspector Harker, and his younger, fitter, hipper and more computer-savvy assistant, Detective Sergeant Critchley. As with many such stories (think of Morse and Lewis, for example), much of the entertainment comes from the interaction of the lead characters.

Volume 1, which I should have reviewed last year but obviously never got around to, was called The Book of Solomon and featured the murder of a well-known London occultist. Book two — The Woman in Black — takes us to Whitby. Harker is on vacation (amongst other things he is visiting the grave of his great grandmother). Much to his annoyance, his hotel is hosting a “murder mystery weekend” run by the famous crime writer, Agatha Fletcher. When the obnoxious Ms. Fletcher ends up as the victim of her own crime party the vacation is put on hold.

Comic-based crime stories share an advantage with television – it is possible to give visual clues. You can do visual jokes too. There is one lovely section in which Harker and Critchley are sat on the pier complaining about how dull Whitby is as a corpse floats in on the tide below them, making a liar of the Inspector.

There are other good comedy sections too. Whitby is the subject of an annual Goth pilgrimage. Part of the festivities involves a soccer match between a town team and the Goths. Having discovered this, Gibson & Danks had to include it, though I doubt that the actual Goths are quite as depressed as they are portrayed.

Of course the story is about a murder — several of them actually — so the story can’t be all comedy. The eventual explanation for the crimes is a serious business, as it should be. Harker is generic police procedural fiction, but it is well done and the central characters are good fun. I’m looking forward to the next one.