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Noir detective gets a sci-fi spin for 'Red City'

Brian Truitt
USA TODAY
Futuristic gumshoes and old-school femme fatales are a part of the genre-melding series "Red City."

Rival gangs, crooked politicians, femme fatales and a square-jawed hero with a Band-Aid on his nose are a hardboiled fan's dream, even if you take them off the mean streets of Los Angeles and New York and toss them onto the planet Mars.

Created by writer Daniel Corey (Moriarty), Red City is a futuristic throwback blending Ray Bradbury science fiction with the two-fisted crime tales of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

The four-issue Image Comics limited series takes readers to a universe that's been combined into a single structure, the New Solar System, where the planets — even Pluto — are supposed to act as one nation. However, Venus and Neptune attempted to secede, starting the Unification War, and now everybody's playing nice for a little bit as the planetary governments work to create galactic peace through a treaty called The Amnesty.

Cal Talmage, an Earthman who was raised in Mars Central City, was a Marine who served in the war. Now as a federal security officer for the NSS, he's kind of an anti-authority sort who tends to find trouble wherever he goes, and Cal has been tasked to find the missing daughter of a Mercurian ambassador before peace talks go down the cosmic tubes in his hometown.

"But it all blows up in his face, of course," Corey says.

Old-school literary gumshoes inspired parts of Cal's personality, according to Corey, but none more than Paul Newman's detective in the 1966 movie Harper, based on Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels.

An orphan who ran with street gangs who's currently doing time with the intergalactic equivalent of the FBI, Cal is "a disenfranchised, fringe guy who doesn't want you to know it but he really kind of wants acceptance," Corey says. "For all his nonconformist and rebellious ways, he's really trying to fit in somewhere."

Cal runs afoul of Mars Central law enforcement at the end of the first issue, but in Red City No. 2 (out Wednesday), illustrated by Mark Dos Santos, he finds help in the form of an old flame. Angel's a redheaded "cleaner" for the galaxy's deadliest assassin, plus her talents really come in handy when a shootout breaks out while being chased by alien mobsters.

Corey admits to having a little crush on the leading ladies he writes in my stories, and while a brutal criminal and not someone to bring home to mom, she's also strong and fiercely independent.

"She doesn't depend on Cal for anything," the writer says. "She's not a damsel in distress, he never rescues her. She doesn't have to help him but she wants to, but what are her real motivations?"

Corey's also created a rich universe where each races are different from each other, something he took from Bradbury's stories. The Neptunians are thugs and pirates with fascist tendencies who aren't well liked in the universe, the Mercurians are business-savvy folks, Venusians like the finer things in life, and Earth is pretty much the poorest place in the bunch at this point.

"This is going to be an ongoing thing, all these different planets trying to cooperate with each other. It's fascinating for me to develop that," Corey says.

Building a structure of law enforcement and politics with such enormous diversity came out of melding the sci-fi and noir genres, as did smaller-scale scenes like Cal's reckoning out in the desert in issue 3, illustrated by Moriarty artist Anthony Diecidue. Like The Big Sleep, Corey wants to cover the outskirts of the city as well as the casinos, ritzy homes and industrial sectors.

"I'm kind of expressing my love for Los Angeles in all the travels and topographies we're seeing in Red City," says Corey, who's currently helping filmmaker James Cotton adapt to comic form his original story Gangsterland, a Southern-fried fairy-tale look at Al Capone's time in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1928.

Corey now calls Southern California home, but a lot of the stuff that's influenced Red City he discovered growing up in Florida. He watched old crime films as a youngster, and before cable, DVDs and Netflix, he says, "it seemed common for a kid who was 6, 7, 8 years old to know who Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart are."

And because it rained every afternoon at 4 during the summertime, he'd come inside to watch 1960s Star Trek reruns.

Those episodes showed him how versatile he could be, Corey says. "One week it's a murder mystery, one week it's a spy story, one week it's a morality tale. The idea of blending genres came naturally because that had been instilled in me as a kid."

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