Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

This is sort of a Doctor Who spin-off: the Sleeze Brothers, shady P.I.s, were introduced in Follow That TARDIS!, a DWM strip collected in A Cold Day in Hell! At the time I read the original strip, I wrote, "The Sleeze Brothers went on to have their own comic series from Marvel. The Tardis wiki doesn't count it as part of the Doctor Who
universe, but who knows why. [...] You can get it pretty cheap on the secondary
market, but I am not sure I am motivated to do so..." And yet, I was! I am not sure if I could explain why, except that I found something charming and uniquely Marvel UK-ish about the whole thing. The pastiche-heavy future world of these strips struck me as being very much of a piece with Russell T Davies's "New Earth" setting, and thus something that fit into the Doctor Who universe in spirit, if not in continuity. (Though, having read them all now, they totally could be part of the Doctor Who universe.)

This contains six single-issue stories, plus an eight-page prologue establishing how the Sleeze Brothers—formerly minor criminals—became private investigators. If you read interviews about this series, it's often stated that despite the fact that though it seems like a Blues Brothers rip-off, it's really not; this is totally belied by this story, which opens just like the film, with El Ape Sleeze (or "El'ape" in some of the stories) meeting his brother Deadbeat after he's released from the penitentiary, following by a gratuitously destructive car chase. So who knows.

The six stories here are fine. None are works of genius, though by the end of the volume, I found there was a certain weird charm. Blues Brothers may have been a starting point, but it was never this weird. They get involved in gang wars, in attempts to use holotelevision to brainwash the city, in attempted presidential assassinations, in Clueesque murder mystery dinners, in behind-the-scenes shenanigans at award shows, in intergalactic peace conferences. Most of the time, they are almost gleefully unaware of the stories unfolding around them, not understanding why anything has actually happened

I wouldn't say I loved any of these stories, but there was only one I didn't like, the presidential assassination one, which seemed to have little panel time for the ostensible main characters, and was too much on the convoluted side. (I think the cases should be beyond their understanding, but not mine!) Most of the time, I was enjoying the inane details and strange pastiche that makes up their universe. I mean, it's not high art, but it's so completely itself that I couldn't help but be charmed by it.

As you watch the Sleeze Brothers going up against a two-headed pig police sergeant, crawling through sewers, ending up in an Alien pastiche, satirizing the sexual intrigues of the Kennedy administration, revealing the killer is a parasitic life-form living on his brother's back, encountering an army of ninja cats, it's clear that no one made this comic book to appeal to a preexisting trend or perceived gap in the market. No one here was out to make a quick buck, because this is not the comic that could make anyone one. This exists because John Carnell and Andy Lanning wanted it to exist, and because they loved it. And I think that comes through at its best moments.

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