Inside The Mind Of Sherlock Holmes: The Case Of The Scandalous Ticket h/c back

Page 45 Comicbook Of The Month, December 2023.

It's so very clever! And beautiful to behold, the most intricate architecture rendered with delicious detail across such expansive space thanks to the subtly sympathetic colouring.

What Zoe Thorogood did to shake up the memoir genre from its oft-plodding torpor, INSIDE THE MIND OF SHERLOCK HOLMES does for the medium's less experimental narrative compositions.

I'm going to make a bold comparison here, but the comics mapping - only the mapping, mind! - is as witty as Chris Ware's. It's not as subtle, sure, but too few other comics craftspeople use the diagramatical mapping potential of the comics medium, and for a glance inside the methodical process of a forensic detective, it's perfect. Whereas Ware leaves the reader to draw their inferences from a torn photograph in a closed drawer, here the trail is deductive, explicitly spelling out observation, association, reasoning and conclusion.

There's a particularly satisfying composition - the whole page of panels /rooms in the framing shape of a victorian playhouse! - in which Holmes mentally reenacts victims' and suspects' movements within a theatre on a specific night, moving the protagonists within like a giant-sized puppet master to best gauge their possible paths / encounters.

There are also several Brain-Attics of information, an hourglass, rooftops, and a cog- and steam-driven factory - some shown in my photos.

No page is a gimmick - each construction / composition is in direct service to the story - when in the lesser hands the whole endeavour would be but a vapid gimmick.

Oh, and there are actual maps.

Just... terrific.