He could, however, introduce Rider to Carlos Cabaleiro, who loved the characters. An artist, Michael Dorman, who had a lot of noir-style detective art in his portfolio, loved the story, but he’d already done the work he wanted to do in that genre. Major Holmes & Captain Watson began as a short story, which Rider took to a San Diego Comic-Con networking event. I still have that original two-volume set of Doyle’s works that she gave me, they sit within arms’ reach in my office at all times, and they are nearly falling apart because they are my favorite version.” “I was a little young for them at the time, but it wasn’t more than a year or two before I’d devoured them all. Rider’s introduction to Sherlock Holmes came courtesy of his grandmother, a librarian, who gifted him, he remembers, when he was about seven years old, “a box of great adventure fiction: Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, and of course, The Complete Sherlock Holmes, this gorgeous two-volume set.

I found myself walking around hearing the voices of the new Holmes & Watson in my head, they would just not go away, and I realized it was something I’d been waiting most of my life to write.” I remember thinking, ‘I should remake that goofy story I wrote as a kid into a comic.’ And for weeks I could NOT let the idea go. As an adult storyteller trying to break into the world of comics, it was the moment that Doyle’s canon (or the majority of it) became public domain that really sparked Major Holmes & Captain Watson into life. “I grew up on classic adventure fiction and always just wanted to do my version of that stuff. Plenty of people write Sherlock in plenty of versions, but I wanted to make something no one had seen, and really put a lot of myself into it. He says, “I love him, but he’s not my character, and so doing something Sherlock-related (in this case literally) gave me a chance to homage the character, to play in his world, but to also tell a new story that was mine. He’s a long-time Sherlock Holmes fan but he specifically didn’t want to write about the detective. Rider has been working on this story in various formats since he was ten or eleven years old. The book was self-published under the Cloudwrangler Comics label, and it’s recommended for ages 13 and up.

It’s the story of how in 1914, Major Sheffield Holmes, nephew of Sherlock and “Uncle Mike”, and the American Captain Imogen Watson solve a murder that has repercussions for a coming global war. The four-issue miniseries, illustrated by Ismael Canales, funded through two rounds in fall 2020 and spring 2021. Writer Jeff Rider launched the original Sherlockian comic book, Major Holmes & Captain Watson, via crowdfunding. This article originally appeared in Sherlock Holmes magazine issue #11, Winter 2022/23.

Robinson crusoe illustrated