Escapism is one of the appeals of the fantasy genre. It’s a chance to visit a world where impossible things like magic and monsters are real, and to go on epic quests to save the world. It can be just as fun and interesting though to see those elements bump up against real world events such as crime and murder. Generally you only see that collision in fantasy tales set in the modern worlds like Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series. There are a number of authors, though, who have combined the elements of crime and noir with stories set in mythical or ancient realms.

[Crime and Fantasy were made for each other!]

This is Life by Seth Harwood is the second Jack Palms mystery, set in San Francisco (available February 19, 2013).

I grew up in the ’80s and fondly remember the action movies of that era. They were exciting and full of edge-of-your-seat thrills. Violence was a big part of those thrills, but one of the things I firmly remember from watching those movies as a kid was how utterly terrifying the violence could be. Gunshots were loud! When people were hit by them blood exploded from their bodies! Violence wasn’t glamorized, it was ugly and painful. So the best of these films managed to be both visceral and exciting, but also give you a sense that death and destruction were forces that you didn’t want to be part of your world. Those are hard stories to tell because fun and grim consequences are not easy things to balance, but writer Seth Harwood does an admirable job in his latest thriller to hit print, This is Life.

[It is all about the balance...]

His skill with a bow and arrow is so great that it allows him to stand shoulder to shoulder with gods, giants, and legends. His name is Clint Barton aka Hawkeye and this summer filmgoers everywhere were introduced to him thanks to the feature film adaptation of Marvel Comics’ “Avengers” series.

Hawkeye (as portrayed by Jeremy Renner) spent quite a bit of the film in thrall to the villainous Loki so people who were meeting him for the first time only caught a glimpse of the character’s aim, cunning, sarcasm, and heart. Readers who have been following Hawkeye’s comic book adventures since his introduction in 1964’s “Tales of Suspense” #57 know the Avenging Archer possesses all of these qualities in spades, especially if they’re reading the current Hawkeye series by writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja.

Hawkeye would go on to fight alongside Iron Man, but in his initial comic book appearances in “Tales of Suspense” he fought against the Armored Avenger. Those early battles came about because of the machinations of his future teammate the Black Widow who was still a spy for the Soviet Union at the time and would become an Avenger herself years later.

[His aim is true...]

He took on a high-tech empire decades before Luke Skywalker and his friends challenged Darth Vader and his Emperor. He was leading bands of freemen in guerrilla operations years before Frank Herbert recorded the adventures of Paul Atreides in his classic science fiction novel Dune. Of course, I’m talking about that fictional character whose adventures are the subject of one of the catchiest Queen songs ever: Flash Gordon.

Flash made his debut in newspaper comic strips in 1934 and would go on to become one of the most influential science fiction heroes of all time. His four-color adventures and the movie serials based on them would inspire the creation of landmark science fiction franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars. The reason Flash’s adventures had such a monumental impact on popular culture was because of the creators involved: the artist Alex Raymond and the strip’s writer Don Moore. Recently fans in the U.S. have been given a chance to rediscover or become acquainted with Raymond and Moore’s Flash Gordon work thanks to a beautiful series of library edition hardcovers.

The latest collected edition in the series Flash Gordon: The Tyrant of Mongo Sundays 1937-1941 collects Moore and Raymond’s Sunday strips which detail Flash’s epic adventures across the planet Mongo and his quest to bring down the empire of Ming, the titular tyrant. The book opens with an informative essay by comics writer and Flash Gordon historian Doug Murray, and then you get your first glimpse of a lavish and beautiful world...

[Take me to Mongo!]

If you were an HBO subscriber from 2002 to 2008 you got to watch something special unfold. That something special was of course David Simon’s acclaimed drama The Wire, which at first glance appeared to be a police procedural about the war on drugs on the streets of Baltimore. Viewers quickly discovered though that The Wire was about so much more. The cops and the criminals were fully fleshed out characters with both positive and negative personality traits, and each season their struggle bumped up against, and influenced, the lives of the citizens and institutions of Baltimore, including the unions, the politicians, the schools, and the newspaper.

So by the end of its run it was clear that The Wire wasn’t just a crime show. It was a television program about the entire community of Baltimore and its struggle to survive. That’s the reason it fascinated so many viewers during its run and that’s why it continues to capture the imagination of viewers discovering it for the first time years later on DVD.

[And if you liked that, you’re gonna love this!]

Throughout history, technology and social conditions have changed, but human nature usually doesn’t. So crime has always been part of our world and unless things change drastically it will continue to be part of society well into the future. The one thing that will change in the future though is how crime is committed and how it’s fought. For years writers have been postulating what the future of law breaking and law enforcement will look like with stories that meld the conventions of sci-fi and crime fiction. So it’s a genre cocktail with something to offer all types of crime fiction fans and in this piece we’ll look at some notable, and some of my favorite, sci-fi crime hybrids.

Perhaps the best-known example of sci-fi crime tales is the subgenre known as cyberpunk, which has been characterized as “high tech and low life.” In cyberpunk, outlaws and antiheroes use technology, cunning, and often violence to fight back, outwit, and escape powerful organizations, such as corporations.  Computers and artificial environments like cyberspace are also an important element in cyberpunk. So the stories often read like surreal and trippy noir tales. Writers such as Phillip K. Dick and Alfred Bester paved the way for the cyberpunk genre, which kicked off in the ’80s with the emergence of its most notable author, William Gibson whose 1984 novel Neuromancer is viewed as a classic of the genre.

[Bring on the crime-solving cyborgs!]

Back in 2003 writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore launched a small independent series from Image Comics about a band of survivors trying to make their way in a world that had been devastated by a zombie apocalypse. The series was called The Walking Dead and over the next several years big things would happen to it. The first was that Charlie Adlard began providing the art for the series on issue #07 and the covers from issue #24. Then, thanks to word of mouth, Kirkman’s magnum zombie opus became a huge hit.

The hit became a phenomenon thanks to AMC’s immensely popular adaptation of The Walking Dead, which premiered in 2010 and wrapped up its second season as the highest rated basic cable drama of all time and an international success in 120 countries and 250 million households. The television series drew more people to the comic, making its sales stronger than ever as the top-selling graphic novel of 2011. It’s on track to repeat that feat for 2012, and it reached its milestone 100th issue on July 11.

Kirkman continues to write The Walking Dead and serves as both a writer and executive producer on the television adaptation. So he’s a very busy man, but he still has time to produce other comics as well. This past February, he and his collaborators, co-writer Nick Spencer and artist Shawn Martinbrough, launched a series that is poised to be another Walking Dead-style phenomenon, the heist thriller series Thief of Thieves.

[It may be a thriller, but it definitely doesn’t lack humor . . .]

When it comes to fiction I love most genres: horror, science fiction, and especially crime. I even enjoy a good western. But when it comes to the fantasy genre my tastes get a little more complicated. I enjoy modern day fantasy stories like The Dresden Files or the Harry Potter books and the classic sword and sorcery style tales of writers like Robert E. Howard are a lot of fun. What I really don’t enjoy though are books that tend to fall under the heading of Epic Fantasy. To me Epic Fantasy tales can often feel like bloated, morally simplistic stories where the author is more interested in giving you exposition about the history of their world than developing their characters.

So last year when many of my friends began raving about Game of Thrones, HBO’s television adaption of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series of novels, I just didn’t get it. I had seen the books and they looked like they were way too long. So I watched the first few episodes of the first season  and suddenly I was hooked. Everybody loved it because there was something for everybody, especially a crime fiction fan like me! It wasn’t just the show either—having just finished the novel that inspired the first season of the television show I can definitely say that the series has enough crime, intrigue, and morally murky action to satisfy any crime or noir fan.

[Winter is coming . . .]

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Publisher William Gaines’s EC Comics began a new line of titles that included several different genres, most notably crime and horror. The comics featured stunning art and tightly plotted tales that often incorporated twist endings. They were violent, lurid, and fun, so naturally they incensed alarmist academics and politicians looking for something to blame all of society’s ills on. In 1954, a number of publishers banded together to create the Comics Code Authority as a way of satisfying a hysterical public that believed comic books were turning adolescents into violent criminals

The Comics Code Authority contained strict regulations on what could be published in Code-approved books and these regulations basically prohibited EC from continuing to publish most of their best selling crime and horror titles. As time wore on though the code began to become looser and gradually lost power. These days, there are a number of crime and horror comics. There are even a few titles that combine those two genres together to tell fun, frightening, and intriguing stories. Tim Seeley’s long-running Hack/Slash series and Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s fifteen-issue epic Fatale both exemplify this kind of work, though in very different ways.

Seeley’s Hack/Slash series was born in 2004 out of his love for good and so-bad-they’re-good horror films, specifically those of the slasher sub-genre like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. These tend to involve some form of serial killer stalking a group of restless teenagers until one of their number, usually a female, fights back and destroys the killer.

[Bring on the slashers!]

When a crime is committed a balance is upset and with that comes a sense of unease and perhaps even dread, especially if the perpetrator of the crime renains at large. It’s like a monster has been set loose into society and sometimes that’s exactly what’s happened... because the crime and horror genres go together like chocolate and peanut butter. Writers have been combining elements of these genres together for years to create stories that maximize the strengths of both genres.

These crime-horror hybrids all take a detail-oriented and often gritty approach to the actions of the criminals and the people trying to stop them, but where they usually differ from traditional procedurals is in the role otherworldly elements play in the narrative. In this piece we’ll take a look at the types of horror commonly found in some recent and popular crime series.

[Beware the shadows]

A morgue attendant in a white lab coat pulls open a battered metal drawer. Its contents are a corpse that’s been recently murdered in a brutal and strange fashion. The attendant steps back and two guys in suits lean forward to examine the corpse for clues to its demise. Sound like a scene from Law & Order or one of the many police procedurals or forensics shows? Wrong! It’s a scene that appears often in the long-running series, Supernatural. 

Over the course of several seasons, the seventh which is currently unfolding, the protagonists of Supernatural, brothers Sam and Dean Winchester, have investigated and eliminated many of the things that go bump in the night. So the show features many elements of horror and fantasy, but what makes it truly interesting is that it does so through the filter of hardboiled crime fiction.

[Now wait a minute...there’s going bump and bumping off...]

Wars are common occurrences in crime fiction. They can be gang wars between rival mobsters, a war on drugs, or an all-encompassing war against the forces of organized crime itself. The latter type of war has been waged by many memorable protagonists like Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, Richard Stark’s Parker, Don Pendleton’s Mack Bolan, and Bolan’s four-color descendant, Marvel Comics’ U.S. Marine-turned-vigilante Frank Castle, AKA the Punisher.

Acclaimed thriller writer Greg Rucka joins artists Marco Checchetto, Matthew Southworth, Matthew Clark, and color artist Matt Hollingsworth to kick off a new campaign in the Punisher’s ongoing war against organized crime. The Punisher Volume 1 (March 14, 2012) is a graphic novel that collects the first six issues of the title character’s current series.

One common way to follow a war on crime is through the perspective of the person that wages it. Rucka isn’t interested in doing that, though. The Punisher is almost a force of nature in the opening stories. His first line of dialogue doesn’t come until the end of the third story in the collection. So instead of the Punisher’s perspective, Rucka offers up the P.O.V.s of several compelling characters caught up in the Punisher’s current campaign against crime.

These characters’ fates become intertwined when two rival gangs open fire on each other in the middle of a wedding, killing most of the guests. The first characters we meet are the detectives assigned to make sense of the massacre, and they allow Rucka to graft some interesting police procedural elements onto his tale. They are veteran Detective Ozzie Clemons, who has a keen analytical mind and is morally offended by the Punisher’s violent crusade, and his new partner, Detective Walter Bolt, who unbeknownst to Ozzie, is an informant for the Punisher.

[Hero or villain? Who sees the Punisher truly?]

For years, crime fiction writers have used first-person narrators to describe the world around them. Hard boiled P.I.s would tell you what a seedy bar smelled like or what kind of body a suspicious dame had.

But what sort of insights into the world of crime would a blind narrator provide? How would he describe a lavish mob wedding? Or an impending assault by a group of heavily armed gunmen? In the upcoming Daredevil, Volume 1—a graphic novel collecting issues 1-6 from 2011—writer Mark Waid and artists Paolo Manuel Rivera and Marcos Martin answer those questions and more as they reintroduce Marvel Comic’s titular blind superhero.

[Now bring on the art and the action!]