Mike W. Barr’s detective team gets a little competition from none other than Ellery Queen in solving the murder attempt on a mystic channeling the spirit of an Atlantean sorcery 10,000 years dead — who claims he is the one trying to kill her!
Mike W. Barr was a big Ellery Queen fan as the editorial page explains and with 1989 being the 60th anniversary year of the first Queen story published, he asked for and got permission to use him in this story, apparantely the first new Ellery Queen mystery in fourteen years.
This is the sole issue of The Maze Agency I own. I’ve never seen another issue pop up, either new or in the back issue bins, though it had a relatively healthy twentythree issue run first at Comico and then at Innovation from 1988 to 1991. There have also been several reboot attempts. It’s a bit of an oddity, a proper, classical detective series which actually tries to create fair mysteries for the reader to solve, when most American detective series are of the hardboiled variety. Mike W. Barr is probably still best know for his Batman work in the eighties (alongside Camelot 3000), especially Batman and the Outsiders, so he wasn’t quite new to writing murder mysteries. The artwork here is by Adam Hughes, present on the first nine issues.
I only knew about this because Comics Scene had done an interview with Barr about his current projects at the time. Comics Scene was a glossy comics and animation magazine in the vein of Fangoria or Starlog, with half of each issue devoted to animation as well as comics based movies and tv, the other half to interviews with comics creators and other comics news. My local comic shop started carrying it at roughly the same time as it started selling US comics and it was one of the few ways I learned about new and upcoming projects. I’ve always had a soft spot for it ever since but in the nineties it lost out to the wave of comics as investment huckster zines like Wizard. Unlike those though it was smart enough to see that the mid-nineties superhero boom would inevitably crash and honest enough to warn its readers about it.
Innovation, The Maze Agency‘s publisher for most of its run, was an interesting company. Founded in 1988 by David Campiti it became a fairly major player in the few years between the decline of the old school indepedents like Comico and the rise of Valiant and Image. Ironically, given its name, it had its biggest success doing comics of various nostalgic media franchises like Lost in Space as well as long, (twelve issue) adaptations of several Anne Rice novels. The Maze Agency wasn’t the only series it had taken over from a defunct company. They also continued various superhero titles from publishers that went bankrupt during the black & white comics bust. Sadly, they in turn went bankrupt in 1994.
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