NYCC 2013: Dynamite’s ‘Control’ Brings Procedurals to Comics

Police procedurals are par for the course on television – Law & Order, CSI, what have you – and there are plenty of movies which follow that kind of format as well. Not so many comic books, though. Andy Diggle and his wife Angela Cruickshank aim to change that when they team up with Ben Oliver for Control, an early-2014 series from Dynamite Entertainment featuring a cop named Kate Burnham who investigates a conspiracy that reaches to the bigwigs in Washington D.C.

“Police procedurals are massive in film, television, and fiction, but they’ve always been strangely under-represented in comics,” Diggle says.  “Even the very best of them, like Gotham Central, Powers, and Chew, often have an element of the weird, the supernatural, or the downright spandexy.  With Control, we wanted to write a 100% police procedural, the kind of smart, character-driven, real-world crime drama that rules on TV.  It’s about sex, power, and systems of control… and how the little guys have to game a system that’s rigged against them.  If you like The Wire, Damages, State of Play, or Homeland, then hopefully Control will be just the comic you’ve been waiting for!”

“Power is all about perception,” says Cruickshank.  “I love that moment in The Sopranos when Tony agonizes about what they’re going to do when their teenage daughter realizes they have absolutely zero power over her.  Wealth, looks, friends in high places; these are all great assets for the average power player, but the real key to success is fear.  There’s a popular theory, often trotted out by the media, that ‘if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.’  Well, who can honestly say that they have nothing to hide?  No skeletons in the closet.  No moment of regret.  No dark little desire, that if only we thought they could get away with it… We wanted to explore the way that control pushes down from the privileged and the powerful and what happens when the people at the bottom start pushing back.”

Ball gags and American flag thongs. This is going to go somewhere weird.

New York Comic-Con 2013: A Look Inside