Sexton Blake Returns to Action in Rebellion's One-Shot

Best known of conoisseurs of detective and pulp fiction, the detective and man of action Sexton Blake graces comics once more this autumn in Rebellion's The Return of Sexton Blake One-Shot (SEP201396, $15.99).

Created in 1893 by Harry Blyth and published continuously for nearly eighty years in over four thousand stories from over two hundred writers, Sexton Blake may have begun as a knock-off and rival of Sherlock Holmes with his own rooms at Baker Street and his dedutive skills, but over the years Blake grew into his own character, a private detective and agent more action-oriented and patriotically British than his lirerary forebear. Like his rival Sherlock Holmes, Blake would go on to star on the silver screen, radio, and television. Where Sherlock Holmes' great rival was Professor James Moriarty, Blake matched wits with the crooked detective George Marsden Plummer; the voodoo queen Marie Galante; the Council of Eleven, war profiteers who were sabotaging the British war effort in 1915; the disgraced surgeon Huxton Rymer; and, most famous of all, Monsieur Zenith the Albino, a character that made such an impression on Michael Moorcock that he was an inspiration for Elric of Melniboné. And while it is "always 1895," as the writer Vincent Starret put it in his famous poem, for Sherlock Holmes, Blake stayed current with the times, always young and active in the present, solving crimes in the gaslit 1890s, saving Britain from the Germans in World War I, battling the Nazis thirty years later, and busting organized crime in the post-war period.

Blake's career in comics was no less storied, having appeared in comics throughout the Golden and Silver Ages, with a final appearance, for legal reasons, as "Victor Drago," in the pages of the British weekly comic Tornado in 1979. Rebellion's The Return of Sexton Blake One-Shot (SEP201396, $15.99) picks up where Tornado left off with a reprint of the last "Victor Drago" comic by Chris Lowder and Mike Dorey, followed by the first new Sexton Blake comic in forty years from George Mann (Titan Comics' Dcotor Who) and Jimmy Broxton (Hope). Mark Hodder, editor of several recent anthologies of vintage Sexton Blake stories, provides an introduction and historical overview to the character, and Karl Stock provides other text features, including interviews with the creators.

One of the most storied fictional characters of all time, a detective as quick with his wits as he is capable with his fists, Sexton Blake stands ready to be rediscovered this autumn in Rebellion's The Return of Sexton Blake One-Shot (SEP201396, $15.99), bringing together new and classic tales of Baker Street's other private consulting detective. Pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink, and let Sexton Blake take you for an adventure on the foggy streets of London where crime always lurks in the shadows and criminal masterminds are at play.