I hope the future has more flying saucers and less swastika graffiti.

Somehow, detective skills may be at even more of a premium in the future; possibly because people are already pretty unobservant now. From 1995, Mickey Spillane's Mike Danger #1, written and co-created by Max Allan Collins, pencils by Eduardo Barreto, inks by Steve Leialoha. And a big ol' smashed swastika on the Frank Miller cover, because Tekno Comix had money to burn. You've probably heard this, but how do you make a million dollars in comics? Start with ten million.

Mickey Spillane was still alive in 1995, but I'm not sure how much input he had on this aside from cashing some checks. Still, Mike Danger had some history: per the editorial at the start of the issue, he was the prototype for Spillane's later, more well-known P.I. Mike Hammer. The comic market had taken a downturn (not unlike the one that was coming when this was published...) and he reworked his comic pitch into novels, TV, movies, etc. Getting Mike Danger back into comics was probably a fun little lark.

Because an imprint with a name like 'Tekno Comix' probably wouldn't be interested in a hardboiled private eye without a hook, it had a pretty good one: in 1952, Mike tries to help out Lou, a pal from the war, a cheerful nerd writing pulps, who has a crazy story about a Nazi doctor working on something upstate under a new identity as a psychiatrist. Mike is skeptical, until Lou is killed in a 'mugging,' then finds a dead Nazi going through his stuff. Well, he wasn't really dead yet, but Mike takes care of that. Lou had some photos of weird-looking coffins, and Mike works the case: of course the psychiatrist is a Nazi, working on suspended animation, possibly with Hitler frozen in his basement. When the perquisite fight starts a fire, Mike is forced to take shelter in one of the "hiber-chambers," but wakes up after a nice, long sleep...in the future! (This predates my beloved Futurama by four years, but I don't think Mike gets a robot or mutant sidekick.)

Because of relaunch shenanigans, Mike would get another first issue inside of a year; but I also feel like they somehow threw away their hook at some point: I know there was a lengthy flashback story set before he went to the future, and they might have even put him back, too. The only other Tekno book I read was the wildly uneven Gene Roddenberry's Lost Universe books; this one was probably more consistent.