I'm sitting in a hospital room with my father. He was rushed to the ER a few days ago and is in the ICU. I can't stand to see him like this; it's unusual for him to be sick at all, let alone propped up in a hospital bed with pillows, oxygen running to his nose, numerous wires and tubes running from his body. But he's old now. It happens with age.

Born in 1938, he grew up during the Second World War. His brother served in the army. He was a paratrooper who was reported missing in action. It turned out later that he was shot multiple times after jumping from the plane. He survived a close encounter on the ground with a Nazi soldier's bayonet while pouring blood from the many bullet holes riddling his body. He was nursed back to health by locals before being recovered by the United States military. I can't imagine the strain that put on this rural Iowan family or what that must have been like for a fatherless child, hearing that your closest father figure may not be coming home because of something incomprehensible called 'war.' 

Sitting here, I keep thinking about what made me what I am. I was born in 1991, a child of the internet, raised on hyperactive cartoons, edgy humor, Hard Copy, and eBaum's World. Why was I always drawn to the kind of hard-boiled stories that were already fifty years old by the time I was born? I often hear the term "old soul" but I'm not sure that cuts it. I feel like a child of the '90s. So why am I stuck in the 1930s and '40s? 

The Peril of the Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery is a lot of things. It's as much an adventure tale as it is a hard-boiled detective story. It's a New York story as much as it's a story about a world in turmoil. I think it might also be a story about me. 

Am I a hard-boiled detective myself? No, of course not. But I am a product of someone who read those books and saw those movies—someone who could remember seeing an actual new Humphrey Bogart film in the theater. This story, The Peril of the Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery, originated in high school when I wrote and drew sections of a story on comic paper I bought at Pearl Art Supplies in Woodbridge, New Jersey. I didn't know what I was doing, but I was telling a story I felt I needed and wanted to tell. It wasn't overtly personal, I thought, but I felt attached to it regardless. 

I never finished the comic. But in college, I took a screenwriting course and I used the bones of that comic to write a screenplay that was then called "The Clockworker's Union." I clashed with my professor on it. He wanted to reform the story into being a traditional noir tale, sans supernatural elements. I insisted that this wasn't the story I was trying to tell. The story was about technology in the wrong hands, about shady organizations, and enemies embedding themselves in the fabric of our society. Their goal: to undermine America from within. 

I never did anything with that screenplay either. 

But in April of 2023, executive editor Chris Conroy emailed me and asked if I might be interested in concocting an adventure story a la Indiana Jones for DC's revival of the Vertigo imprint with my creative partner Jacob Phillips. It didn't take me long to realize that I had a story in my back pocket. I had been working on it for years—fine tuning it, changing it, molding it. Only now I was going to call it "The Peril of the Brutal Dark."

Now, I sit here and I'm realizing that it wasn't just a fun yarn of a bygone era. That it is personal. It always was. I was brought up on black-and-white films and cartoons. I was introduced to radio programs and stories of ice boxes and cold winters without heat. Those stories formed me, created images in my mind that I could never shake. Peril is a product of growing up with one foot planted firmly in the past. 

I don't appear in its pages. My name is only on the cover. But what you will read in this arc and in every arc going forward is about a world I know. It's about the world that shaped me—an analog world of black-and-white and tinted color. A world of right and wrong, of heroes and villains. It's about an old world. A world long gone that whispers to us that if we're not careful, we're doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past again. 

I hope that this book feels authentic because I think it is. It's an old story, after all. It's everything that made me what I am. 

-Chris Condon
 

The Peril of the Brutal Dark: An Ezra Cain Mystery #1 by Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips is now available in print and as a digital comic book.