The Maze Agency

I read a  lot of comic books back in the '80s, but I didn't read everything. One title I was aware of, had heard good things about but never tried, was The Maze Agency. Over the years, The Maze Agency had seven issues at Comico, #8-23 (plus an annual and a special) at Innovation, and three issues each at Calibre and IDW. Now I hear it's coming back to Scout. The Maze Agency is a "fair play" mystery, meaning that all the clues to solving the crime are available to the reader. Many of the stories are done-in-one.

The only two issues I own are Comico's #1 and Innovation's Special #1. I bought them in the mid-ninties at a quarter sale but never read them. It wasn't until reading about the series return that I learned that one of the series' two main characters shares the same first and last name of a friend of ours, one who has recently expressed an interest in the Sandman comic book because of the TV show. I thought I'd give these two comics a read and then pass them on to her. They were really very good, good enough that I thought I might like to read some more.

My LCS didn't have any backissues, but they did have two tpbs of the early Comico issues, one in b&w and one in color. My backup shop didn't have any backissues, either. Who here used to read The Maze Agency? What did you think of it? Is it worth seeking out?

You need to be a member of Captain Comics to add comments!

Join Captain Comics

Votes: 0
Email me when people reply –

Replies

  • The Maze Agency is SERIOUSLY worth reading Jeff!

    I had no knowledge of Caliber or IDW doing any so will have to track those down, but I loved all the Comico/Innovation issues.

  • I am beginning to come to that conclusion myself, Lee. Today I read Innovation's Special #1. It is three stories, three murder mysteries, all which take place on the same day, morning, afternoon and night, all drawn by different artists. Just a few days ago I discovered a comic book by Joe Staton I didn't know I owned (Marvel Fanfare #39); now here is another. This issue also has a fourth story ("Issue #0" they called it), a previously unpublished tryout story drawn by Alan Davis. Except for the tpb I mentioned in my previous post, however, it doesn't look as if I'm going to be finding any backissues locally. I'll likely buy the new Scout series when it comes out, but it hasn't even been solicited yet as far as I know. I'm hoping the new series will generate interest in a reprint comprehensive collection.

    EDIT: Actually, MyComicsShop.com has most issues in stock at reasonable prices. Hmm...

  • While the majority of my comic book reading is online nowadays, I use a different service than MyComicsShop.com so feel free to get them for yourself and ENJOY!

    By the way, Todd Klien designed the title logo and it wasn't until several issues into the series that Mike W. Barr discovered that the maze was solvable!

    Starting from either THE or the lower left hand corner of the M, you can make it through and out the other side of E.

  • "It doesn't look as if I'm going to be finding any backissues locally."

    I had a bit of good luck today. After having previously checked my primary and secondary LCS for Maze Agency backissues, I swung by my tertiary shop (for the first time in over two years) on my way home from my weekly trip to my primary LCS (which isn't actually so "L"). They had issues #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11 and 12 in their dollar bins! (I'm glad I hadn't pushed the button on that MyComicsShop.com order.) I bought them all, including the duplicate #1. As my wife says, "Ya can't go wrong for a buck!" Now I have an extra copy to give to our friend who shares her name with one of the main characters. 

  • I didn't see this thread earlier, but I was a big fan of The Maze Agency and will be looking forward to its return. I believe I have all the issues from all of the publishers, but not necessarily all of the stories from other titles (although I do have Justice League America #34, January 1990, which features a cameo of Jennifer Mays, Gabriel Webb and Roberta Bliss!).

    The earliest Maze Agency issues feature work from then-new talent Adam Hughes. Sad to say, The Maze Agency never looked so great once he was out of the picture. After that, the art ranged from competent to tolerable to execrable, especially as the series bounced from one publisher to another over the decades.

    As a kid who grew up reading the Encyclopedia Brown series -- the granddaddy of fair-play mysteries for kids -- I loved having a comic that told those kinds of stories. Fair-play mysteries used to be a thing in the 1920s through roughly the 1950s, I gather, with the king of the genre being Ellery Queen. One issue even features Queen as a guest star.*'

    Now, I can't say how "fair" these fair-play mysteries were. If you are going to read them and try to figure out the solution before it's told to you in the wrap-up scene, you want to feel like all the clues were there and if you didn't figure it out it was because you missed one or drew the wrong conclusion. You don't want to feel like the story didn't tell you everything you needed or that it asks you to make monstrous leaps of logic to arrive at the answer. Most of the time I didn't feel that way when I read a Maze Agency story, but sometimes I did. I suppose the fair-play element adds a certain level of complexity to crafting the story, both on the part of the writer and the artist. That makes it rewarding for the reader if you do figure out the mystery, and the stories are short enough to make it feasible. I don't know how people could manage that with full-length novels like the Ellery Queen mysteries

    I liked the Maze Agency lead characters, Jennifer Mays and Gabriel Webb, and the progression of their relationship. Webb is a freelance writer of true-crime stories, always scraping around for his next gig and one paycheck away from financial ruin; Mays is glamorous, tough, and out of Webb's league -- and he knows it -- but she loves him anyway. As the series progresses, we learn intriguing bits of each character's back story; Mays is a former CIA operative, and Webb was a seminary student. (One thing Webb said has always stuck with me: "Waiting until your child is old enough to choose his own religion is like waiting until he's old enough to choose his own dentist.")

    I've often thought The Maze Agency would make for an entertaining TV series, but people would probably think of it as a knockoff of Castle, what with the male writer-female detective dynamic. (I never watched Castle.)

    *Queen I knew only from the short-lived TV series on NBC back in 1975, produced by Richard Levinson and William Link, producers of Columbo. They retooled the idea of a crime-solving mystery novelist into the long-running Murder, She Wrote but didn't continue with the fair-play angle. 

  • ClarkKent_DC said:

    I've often thought The Maze Agency would make for an entertaining TV series, but people would probably think of it as a knockoff of Castle, what with the male writer-female detective dynamic.

    We met our friend named Jennifer Mays last Sunday for lunch. I gave her five comics, including my duplicate copy of The Maze Agency #1. When I told her about it she said, "That sounds like Castle" (which I had never heard of). I asked her whether it aired before or after 1988. She's the one who expressed an interest in Neil Gaiman's Sandman after watching the TV show. Another one of the comics I gave her was Sandman #50 based largely on your recommendation. We're going to meet again for lunch this coming Saturday. Her nephew will be with her and, after lunch, we'll be taking them both on their first trip to a comic book shop. I hope to hear what she thought of both The Maze Agency and Sandman when next we meet. 

  • Jeff of Earth-J said:

    We met our friend named Jennifer Mays last Sunday for lunch. I gave her five comics, including my duplicate copy of The Maze Agency #1. When I told her about it she said, "That sounds like Castle" (which I had never heard of). I asked her whether it aired before or after 1988. 

    Castle aired on ABC from 2009 to 2016. It starred Nathan Fillion as title character Richard Castle, the writer half of the romantic lead/detective duo. Stana Katic played NYPD Lieutenant Kate Beckett, the other half of the team. The premise is that Castle shadows Beckett on her cases to glean story ideas, and she doesn't want him around, getting in the way ... which of course means they fall for each other, this being a TV show.

    Like I said, I never watched it, mostly because I think of Castle as a Maze Agency knockoff.

  • Yeah, she told us about it. We pretty much agreed it was probably a knockoff of The Maze Agency. Since I posted on the 31st I've managed to acquire almost an entire run. So far I've read only as far as #4, but I capped off reading a few series just yesterday and hope to be reading more Maze Agency issues soon. Because they're mostly standalone (from what I hear), it's an easy series to pick up and put down without getting caught up in a lengthy run (such as Swamp Thing's "Parliaments of Stuff"). 

  • Ellery Queen was really two cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. Their pseudonym doubled as the name of their hero, the college-educated son of a New York inspector. Ellery was initially modelled on S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance, a guy from the American upper-class who assists the police. Later Ellery was a professional mystery novelist and sometime screenwriter. Reportedly, Dannay was more responsible for the outlines, and Lee for the writing. The character was also a success on radio in The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

    The best Queen novels are very satisfying, because the mysteries are intriguing and the solutions and clever but logical. There's also an element of depiction of contemporary America. From The Player on the Other Side many of the novels were ghost co-written. Those I've read read a lot like the cousins' books, so I take these to have been outlined by Dannay. A couple of the late books by the cousins themselves are quite weak, and likely to put a new reader off.

    The Queen name was also used in the 60s/70s on quite a number of thrillers by other writers that didn't feature Queen as a character. According to Wikipedia these were mostly "edited and supervised" by Lee. I've not read any of these.

    Comics-wise, Ellery Queen appeared in a premium giveaway Gulf Funnies Weekly, Western's Crackajack Funnies in 1940-41, a short-lived Ellery Queen title from Superior in 1949, another from Ziff-Davis in 1952, and three Dell Four Colors in 1961-62.

    The plot of the instalment of The Spirit for Jul 18 1943 was pinched from a short story from The New Adventures of Ellery Queen, "House of Darkness". (This was one of the instalments while Eisner was in the army. the GCD attributes it to Manly Wade Wellman and Lou Fine. That was a surprise to me: I thought Jack Cole.) The adaptation makes very good use of the story's visual potential.

    Martin Pasko's story "A Clue Before Dying!" in Detective Comics #459 was likely a homage to the Queens. So too David V. Reed's "Hang the Batman" in DC Special Series #15. So too the title (not the plot) of the 1984 Batman Special by Mike Barr and Michael Golden, "The Player on the Other Side!"

    In newspaper strips Rip Kirby, criminologist private detective, was in the vein of Philo Vance and Ellery Queen: a college-educated man who solves crimes.

  • Since the subject of Ellery Queen has arisen, I have posted a bibliography for him elsewhere.

This reply was deleted.