Australia gets reimagined as a realm of giants, renamed as the sovereign nation of Brobdingnag, in Huge Detective (Titan Comics). The “playful series opener” elevated by “intricate and imaginative worldbuilding,” per PW’s review, released in a trade edition in November following a buzzy direct market comics run.
LA-based comics writer and film script consultant Adam Rose (who in his spare time, publishes short stories in lit journals like Parentheses) teamed up with Brazilian artist Magenta King (Jenny Zero) for the project. The basic conceit: enormous humanoids known as the Huge erupted from the ground and into conflict with humans, winning the world’s smallest continent for their homeland. Forty years later, it’s up to detectives Tamaki (human) and Gyant (Huge) to solve a series of murders before they restart the Human-Huge war. Since neither of the creators are actually Australian, when PW sat down with Rose for a chat, the first question seemed obvious…
Why Australia?
I was going for a large land mass that could sustain a group of beings the size of skyscrapers that wasn’t the Arctic. There’s a subplot of human Australians being quite upset with this choice and continuing to fight on—as well as those that have been displaced and redispersed around the planet.
Have you always been drawn to giants?
Since I was a kid, I’ve been a big fan of Kaiju, Godzilla, King Kong, all the creature double features that used to be on Saturday when we had just plain old TV and rabbit ears to watch it with. Also, later, Roald Dahl’s The BFG and Attack on Titan.
Huge Detective started from a habit of telling little stories off the cuff at bedtime to my daughter. She was only nine at the time, so it began in a friendly space. Then when I left her room, it got darker and more True Detective.
Why was Titan the right publisher for this series?
I love a lot of the IP they work with, like Dr. Who and Conan, and their Blade Runner series, which is also noir or cyber punk. And—maybe because they are a British publisher—they were jazzed by the literary connection to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
How did you and Magenta King figure out depictions of scale and perspective, between the human and giant points of view?
The collaboration on that was incredible, especially King’s inventiveness. I remembered as a little kid, looking through binoculars, flipping ’em over—we’re playing with that idea. There’s a nod to Kids in the Hall, where there was a character that would look at people between his index finger and his thumb and squish them. Magenta got where I was trying to go with those influences, creating splash pages where we see the awesomeness of Detective Gyant, but also zoom in on a mini panel of Tamaki interacting with him. Comics as a medium gives space where you can actually show a relationship between characters both the size of an ant and an elephant on the same page.
Huge Detective does a lot of worldbuilding in a small space in the limited series—do you know where you would go from here if you continued the series?
I’ve already mapped out one idea with Magenta. It’s what happened at the Omega event when the Huge first appeared, but set in a different, remote part of the world. People have also said, Gosh, I would read a whole series on Dollsville—the voluntary human zoo for Huge amusement. I would love to explore the human perspective of choosing to sacrifice in order to live in an opulent way, being played with as a toy by these giants.
