In Los Angeles there is a private investigator who is willing to take on any case, no matter how strange it may sound. If nobody believes about the ghost that has been following you, or the UFO that kidnapped your parents, and the police won’t listen as to your claim that fish-men stole your car, there is a detective who will listen to any case. The Panda Detective knows that the world is full of strange and dangerous things. After all, he is one.

Panda Detective is a character who, until this sketch, was just that name scrawled on a page of notes. I know the sort of things I like in superhero comics, and this sort of weird thing is exactly it. I’ve never read a comic with DC’s Detective Chimp, but the fact that character even exists makes me feel better inside.

I would also say that, in my head at least, there is a strong connection between the type of adventures a private eye and a superhero should be having. You’ve got plenty of superheroes who solve mysteries (Batman, notably, is supposed to be the world’s greatest detective who, for whatever reason, dresses in a bat costume), and you’ve got heroes that work for the government or law enforcement agencies (usually the “big time” heroes like the Avengers). But, for some reason, most superheroes are just guys who wander around looking for things to fight. The flaws with these Patrolling Superheroes is that it means that most of the adventures they find like this are crimes in progress. If these guys maybe got a license and opened an office where civilians could reach them, suddenly you have a wider variety of potential starting points for superhero fun.

I think a part of this problem, though, is the way superhero adventures (and action adventures in general) have been scaled up so much over the last few decades. Saving a family is not as important as saving a city, or a world, or multiple universes. With adventures having to have such high stakes, the stories tend to start with something smaller blowing up or dozens of people being killed. Or, for a solo hero, like most of those who do the patrols, the stakes have to involve some “this time it is personal” level, so you can just have villains come right out and attack the hero. Superheroes who just solve the problems of people are not as common, and that bugs me. So… Panda Detective.

So now that I’m Twitter I know more about what people on the Internet are doing. I guess one of the things that people are doing today is hourly comics. That is to say, they are creating a comic strip to chronicle each hour of their day. I can do that. So I did:

Anyway, that will do. I’ve had better days, but I’ve had worse too.

Years ago I discovered there was some manner of mystery regarding cereal foods. That mystery: Where all those Golden Grahams go? Well I have an update now!

I don’t go into the cereal aisle very often these days, what with most varieties of cereal foods costing money, but a few days ago I was there and I noticed Golden Grahams. More specifically, it seems to have been rebranded as Golden Graham Crunch. I admit that it had been a long time since I last tried them, but these things seem exactly like regular Golden Grahams to me. Why the chunks the name has been changed, only marketing people could explain. I’m just glad to have eaten Golden Grahams again. I’ll give them Four out of Six Pieces of PDR’s Reviewing System Cake. It’ll be a few years, probably, before I think to look for them again, so they had better still be around.

So that’s one long-running PDR plot thread that has finally been settled. What will be resolved next? Stay terned!

Isabel Langdon’s mother worked for the military, designing rockets and such. Specifically, she was designing a thought-controlled missile guidance system that would have allowed soldiers in the battlefield to call in a rocket salvo and “think” the rockets toward their targets, as well as being able to use the projectiles to bring in supplies or get wounded to hospital. But this experiment was brought to an end when spies working for an enemy group attacked the laboratory, and they had teenaged Isabel as a hostage. They tried to force Isabel’s mother to make them some weapons, but the scientist tricked the terrorists by, at the last moment, turning the thought control machine on herself. She used the mind controlled rockets to stop the terrorist’s plot, but was herself shot in the process. Isabel, seeing what he mother had done, replicated the process on herself and used her powers, and the remaining missiles to capture those who had killed her mother. Though Isabel has no interest in going to war, her mother’s military friends arrange for her to get a job with the police using her new powers to fight crime. So now she’s got a big rocket without a warhead to use as transportation and she’s always tinkering with potential other devices like spy camera rockets, glue rockets, and so on.

The inspiration for this character, and still my favorite thing, is the terrible, terrible pun of the name “Ms. I. L.” Once I had that, it was just a matter of doing a sketch and being done with it. I think the most thought that went into it was “It’s cold up there, so: mittens” which is fine with me because then I didn’t have to draw hands. I think that if I were to do anything further with Isabel, it would have to be in animation. A rocket-riding superhero is something that, I figure, is going to work best when you can see the speed in action. Lots of flying chases and whipping around the cityscape. Also, I’d probably rework the missile itself so that it had a flat bit on top, kinda skateboard-style, to stand on instead of the awkward-balancing-act conical style that I’ve drawn here. As I write that I noted the similarities to a Marvel character I like, the Rocket Racer, who actually does ride a rocket-powered skateboard. I have to wonder why there aren’t more superheroes like this.