The game is afoot.

— Sherlock Holmes

There's just one more question I'd like to ask you.

— Columbo

And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those nosy kids and their mangy dog!

— innumerable Scooby-Doo villains

Forget about making a hundred, forget about the victim, forget about the suspect and focus on the only thing that can't lie: the evidence.

— Gil Grissom, CSI

O photoprocessing machine, I command you to reveal to me that which is hidden!

— Bee

Like most good ideas, mysteries and detective stories have many ancestors, but they didn't really get to take a place in entertainment until the Industrial Revolution. It's not hard to see why. The underlying message behind the traditional mystery—and the traditional detective story, its most famous subgenre—is always the same. That message: our world may seem confusing, but patience, pluck, and especially reason can lay its secrets bare, punish the guilty, and reveal the monsters as aged men in latex or clockwork springs.

[nemesis] is the story of a very normal police detective in a world of super-powered defenders – assigned to solve the murder of their world's greatest hero. Equal parts super-hero parody and noir detective story, it is quite unique on the web. Its creator, Greg Holkan, also joined Eric Burns in the fantasy webcomic Gossamer Commons and although he's letting go of the artistic reins, he retains input into the plotting. Holkan is an interesting mystery himself to unravel, and this interview gives the clues needed.

This is a REview of Femme Noir. Comixpedia first reviewed Christopher Mill's webcomic Femme Noir in October 2003.

When I read the first strip in Femme Noir's latest storyline, I half expected the characters to begin saying "jeepers" and such things. I wasn't disappointed. Fortunately though, the offenders don't last very long.

NOTE: This is a parallel review in which we have two reviewers looking at the same comic. The other review is by Andrew Leal.

John Law is a character, originally created by Will Eisner in the 1940s, whom he ultimately did not actually publish. Instead he repurposed the work he did for this character into stories for his more well-known comic, The Spirit. Despite some claims to the contrary, the full-fledged character of John Law only appeared in print when Eclipse Comics published a one-shot book in 1983 titled John Law, Detective #1.

In this month's Essence of... Ping Teo takes aim at mysteries.