Love detective stories? What about fantasy? If so, we’ve got the comic for you! Introducing Huge Detective by Adam Rose, a new graphic novel that captures all the brilliance of The BFG and Chinatown with Rose’s own unique creative flair.
Adam Rose and Magenta King’s urban fantasy series, Huge Detective, has been collected into its first volume by Titan Comics. Set in a world where giants and humans coexist, the fantasy noir explores their far from harmonious relationship. The giants, known as ‘Huge,’ emerged from the ground during the Omega Event and took over Australia, establishing their own state called Brobdingnag. Decades later, tensions between humans and giants begin to rise when a mysterious murder occurs in the United States, involving a human who believes he’s a giant.
In our review, we praised Huge Detective for its unique premise and compelling plot, calling it “a gem and a read you’ll struggle to put down.”
With Huge Detective now available in trade paperback, we recently caught up with writer Adam Rose. Check out our interview!
Check out our interview in full below:
Comics Bulletin: How does it feel to see Huge Detective out in a glorious trade paperback form?
Adam Rose: I gotta say, it gives me goosebumps seeing you hold it and knowing that I get to talk to you about it officially like this. It’s been a labour of love and with all kinds of interesting little delays because of Diamond and shipping and all the fun stuff, but just to see you holding it in front of me means the world.
CB: For our readers who haven’t picked it up yet, how would you describe Huge Detective in a sentence or two?
Adam Rose: It’s fantasy noir and it’s like Roald Dahl’s BFG meets True Detective, but it’s also a world with humans and giants — or ‘Huge’ as I call them — they’ve had a tenuous peace treaty since the Omega Event, which was like their version of almost a World War III. But now they’re allowing a Huge on human soil for the first time because there’s been a murder, or murders, and the only witness is a human who will only talk to a Huge… and possibly thinks they are Huge.
CB: How long did this story live in your head before you decided to make it into a comic?
Adam Rose: It was almost instant. My daughter’s 12 now, but when I started this story, I used to riff during bedtime and make up stories on the fly and she’d sometimes help me out. This one was very sweet when she was eight or so years old and it started a very nice.
And then when I closed the door to her bed after I kissed her goodnight, I was like, ‘oh, my God, what if I went dark with this? What if it was like this monstrous like relationship between these two groups?’ And I think it was almost right away I just started writing.
CB: You’ve got a detective human and a detective giant who work together. It’s a unique pairing and they have quite the dynamic. Did you create that dynamic first or did the story evolve around it?
Adam Rose: I think it was their relationship that informed parts of the story. I knew where the story was going and I knew the lore, like the history. I’m such a big fan of Tolkien; I’m so impressed by the scope and scale him and Robert E. Howard’s sandboxes. I’ve written a lot of things over the years, but the sandbox level to this Huge-Human world, just there’s so much to play with.
CB: Giants usually stand for brute strength and chaos. However, in stories like The BFG, they can also be gentle and mysterious. Which side of that spectrum did you want to explore specifically with your giants?
Adam Rose: I wanted to explore their humanity, the trauma of the scars of war, the scars of violence on all the Huge as well as the humans and how they interacted. And then in particular, my detective giant, Gyant, he also deals with resisting that compulsion — that urge to eat human beans, as he likes to call them. So there’s a lot of overcoming personal demons for both him and for Tamaki.
CB: Are there any scenes specifically that you think captures the huge’s chemistry or personalities the best?
Adam Rose: Magenta [King], the artist on this, did a great job of conveying the scale. I think splash page of giant sitting there and Tamaki on his shoulder or looking up at him. But we just get like a little circle panel zooming in on her, just showing that juxtaposition of the two of them in the same space. But you see clearly both of their reactions to each other, I think really helped kind of just flesh out their relationship, the dynamic.
CB: So obviously you’ve got the Omega Event, which is a sort of catalyst for the entire story. It reshapes the world, it feels big, it’s mysterious. How much of that backstory did you map out before writing Issue 1?
Adam Rose: There’s a lot to the Omega Event that I would love the chance to explore in the future. I mean, I already have some ideas of like what may be happened in other parts of the world, maybe even what is continuing to happen during this current story. And of course, bringing in just the variety of types of huge that and the different violent interactions they had with humans, because they were here first in a lot of ways; they were just dormant. Not to mention the case files that I have at the end of each issue, which I was so thrilled that Titan let me have in there. I hope they flesh out some moments from the past as well and give like the reader kind of a taste of that Omega Event time.
CB: Do you have any spinoff ideas? What can you tease about any other stories you want to tell in this world?
Adam Rose: Yes, I do. Magenta and I kind of cooked up something really cool that I hope we get the chance to do. You know, you know how it goes in the world of comics as far as when those chances present themselves. But I’ll just say Magenta is from Brazil and I just had this idea of something involving the Huge in Brazil.
CB: How about a story in England?
Adam Rose: I can think of a few other ideas as well that would, yes, certainly take place in England, especially like I think England has like the richest history involving giants as far as like myth and legend.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
We thank Adam Rose for his time. You can buy the trade paperback of Huge Detective here.
