I’ve read enough Grant Morrison comics to know that characters meeting their creators rarely goes well for the character. And while I did touch on the first issue of Peter Milligan, Raül Fernandez, Giada Marchisio, and Jeff Eckleberry’s Profane, the final issue came out not too long—for me at least—ago and the story continues its playing with the idea of the titular character in a detective story having to find his author’s killer. But as the series progresses, the absurd becomes procedural in a way that ends up expanding the world more than contracting it.

Will Profane is still stuck. While he’s able to look at the body of his author, Spud Coltrane, he’s still not able to put together more of the mystery surrounding Spud’s death. With so much of his life connected to the preferences and attitudes of his author, Profane can only do so much within the fictional world where he exists. Egbert Bigg, however, is real. And he’s president of the Will Profane fan club. So strong is his admiration for the detective that Profane is able to make the jump from pure fiction to a kind of reality based on Bigg’s belief. With his anchor in the real world in place, Profane can scout the real LA for clues. Finding Lili Macbeth—Spud’s former girlfriend and Profane’s own love interest—he’s able to find more information from a rival of Spud’s, Ken Kane, and his connection to Profane’s own rival, Red Glove.

While Profane is able to establish his anchor in the real world, we see his rival do the same. And when investigating Spud’s crime scene again, he’s arrested and brought to the LAPD. It’s here that the added twist of the world comes in—this isn’t the first time the real detectives have dealt with these fictional characters coming into the real world. The detail is small and they don’t linger on it too long, but it’s that kind of world-building that takes Profane from a cerebral detective story into its own strange world. As these fictional characters are all essentially flesh-and-blood people, there’s no telling who is and isn’t real. Every person we see in the real LA could still be an elaborate set-up for Profane as he tries to solve this murder. His reality then becomes a kind of unreality. Even as readers outside of the story who can see where it goes in the end begin to doubt if he really does leave the real world, or if there even was a real world to begin with.

As a series, Profane opens up a dozen doors that could lead to anywhere if it were to continue. Milligan, Fernandez, Marchisio, and Eckleberry have created a world that can go as far as they want to push it. And through the amber-colored booze Profane himself pours all over crime novels to divine his clues, we can see the kind of comics that could come from that idea. 

Get excited. Get spiraled.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, 510, & 651) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.