No matter how you look at it, Honour Among Punks is a fantastic value for your money. This $20 graphic novel took me a couple of solid nights of reading to finish, and though it doesn't reach Blankets size or anything, it's a pretty solid brick of a graphic novel with great production values. It is also a pretty darn good read, featuring early work from artistic talent Guy Davis and former Caliber head honcho and writer Gary Reed. My involvement in the punk scene starts and stops through osmosis from reading Oni Press's books, but Davis does a mostly good job of making it accessible and a thoroughly good job of bringing the scene to life. And Reed's stories feature some twisted, intricate mysteries that ably blend the punk and Victorian sensibilities of the whole thing. It's not as polished as a lot of the stuff I've enjoyed from Guy Davis more recently, but it's definitely something that should be in every Guy Davis fan's collection, and fans of Sherlock Holmes and the punk scene as well.
There are two essential components to Baker Street, broken down in the introduction by Gary Reed: the punk scene and the Sherlock Holmes elements. The trickiest part to writing a good Holmesian story, of course, is in creating a compelling mystery, and Reed and Davis build two very good ones in the course of Honour Among Punks. One incorporates gang warfare, museum thefts and murders and the other a serial killer and a murdered girl. They're both fairly intricate, sometimes too much so, especially in regards to the politics of the gangs in the first story, which aren't as clearly defined as I would like. But in general, the intricacy really helps to make the setting feel more real, despite its alternative history nature and distance from anything I'm terribly familiar with.
Also important to all the stories, perhaps moreso than the actual plots, are the characters that Davis and Reed have created. Sue Prendergast reads somewhat like an early Dian from Sandman Mystery Theatre, that intriguing mix of naivete and outsider sensibilities that make her able to perceive and do things that those within the scene can't always pick up on, and she's a likable narrator and point-of-view character for the series. Harlequin, aka Susan Ford, is the Holmes analogue in this story, and she's everything she needs to be, the peacemaker in the punk scene and former cop with impressive deductive abilities, but with human feelings and flaws that make her easy to relate to. Her former partner is a little more perfect, always knowing when to push the rules and when to lay back, but he's a great supporting character who I really like, and a sort of mirror for the deeply flawed Sam, Harlequin's girlfriend who serves as a thorn in Sue's side as well as a cynical commentator on the whole proceedings. She also has a pretty major and surprising character arc in the second mini-series that I really liked.
The Complete Baker Street isn't a completely accurate name for this collection. It certainly collects everything that has been published, including two mini-series and a couple of shorts, as well as previously unpublished material like Guy Davis's character sketches, and it isn't skimpy as far as content goes. However, there's an over-arcing story involving a villain that is built up in the background that never gets resolved, since Davis and Reed both moved on to other things. The perils of publishing older material, I suppose, but I was a little sad that I'd never get to see where the whole master villain story wound up, as it seems unlikely that Reed and Davis will get back to it at this point.
Of course, the big selling point of Honour Among Punks for me is Guy Davis artwork. Clearly, even in his early days, Davis was unbelievable in his attention to detail and setting. His version of this alternate London lives and breathes like a real place, recognizable as the London that most have seen in pictures or in person but with clear changes as a result of the alternate history and focus on the punk scene. Davis's characters aren't quite there at first, looking a little cartoony, a little inconsistent, but by the time the second mini-series has rolled around the same style he uses now has pretty much solidified.
