Mycroft Holmes and The Apocalypse Handbook

I love comics. I love Mycroft Holmes. There is only one comic starring Mycroft, and you’d think I’d enjoy the combination. However, Mycroft Holmes and The Apocalypse Handbook is terrible.

People ask me, whenever it comes up, why I think this, and I become incoherent. I don’t like the plot, the art, the characters, the storytelling, the cliches… So this piece is a way to finally lay out why it’s so disappointing.

The comic, published in 2017, is a tie-in to the three novels by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. Although a new story, it’s meant to be the same version of the character.

I’m not a huge fan, because those books use the “reverse origin” theory — since the Mycroft we “know” is large and lazy and relies on habit, the younger version must be the opposite, slender and active and a daredevil and, frankly, kind of crazy. (Also, he’s got a best friend who’s a tall Black man who knows martial arts and gives him advice when he needs it, so let’s realize that “Mary Sues” aren’t just written by women.)

I don’t particularly care for that approach, because it seems rather lazy to me, and people rarely flip so abruptly in their lives. Thus, I am not the audience for a comic that early on shows young Mycroft sleeping with his professor’s wife… and setting Sherlock up to interrupt them, so he could see a naked woman (whether she agrees or not).

Anyway, the comic is credited as written by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Raymond Obstfeld (who has written other books with Abdul-Jabbar), with art by Joshua Cassara.

The panels are static shots, with little flow between them, so sometimes it’s tricky to figure out what’s happening. The text drives the story, which is a common risk when you have people writing comics for the first time; they don’t always grasp how best to use the medium to its best, with the text and art working together, so they just write out the story and the pictures end up following along.

The authors seem to have fallen prey to the idea that comics are about sex and violence and gore, as the opening sequence has a person exploding before the British Museum blows up. We also see the aforementioned wife naked in a couple of panels.

Mycroft is an uncaring jerk, arguing against saving lives or culture, spending his time in university drinking and gambling. He’s oh so bored with everything. He’s also drawn, for some reason, with an elongated torso, so it looks as if he has a few more sets of ribs than everyone else.

This comic was originally published as a five-issue miniseries. I’m not yet out of the equivalent of issue #1 as I’m writing this. We still have to have Mycroft attacked, kidnapped, threatened by slavering dogs, and recruited for a secret mission. Plus, villain monologuing and mad science.

The mission, at least, interests him, although we also get various super-deductions that are casually explained but unlikely to actually work. The queen appears, of course, but is drawn to look like a teenager. There are a bunch of quasi-magical weapons that allow for more terrible drawings of bodies doing grotesque things.

There’s also a half Native, half Black woman with tons of weapons named “Lark Adler” (who winds up naked later, of course) and a Moriarty relative, just in case you’d forgotten you were reading something about a Holmes. Then comes a bunch of running around, more gore, random historical cameos (Jesse James!), various “clever” deductions from smart-aleck Mycroft (expressed in the most likely way to annoy listening to him), and a walk off into the sunset with a girl. On top of all this, Mycroft is blond. Given everything else, that shouldn’t annoy me as much as it does.

So, summing up: this comic is awful. It’s a bunch of action scenes strung together, with a generic, overly familiar plot, an unrecognizable version of the character, and gratuitous fan service (badly drawn). It reads like some kind of steampunk movie script that no one would pay to make. If you changed the name (and ignored the two or three appearances of young Sherlock, who is much more in character), the story wouldn’t change at all… it might actually make more sense.