The Unknown

It's a story that's part classic chase, part detective, part speculative science, part metaphysical, part crime drama, part buddy flick, and oh, hell, let's just throw in the damn kitchen sink while we're at it and God knows how he did it but it all works.

—Gail Simone's introduction to the first trade paperback.

Catherine Allingham is the smartest detective in the world. She is also dying of a brain tumor and has six months to live. The way she copes with this? Solve the biggest mystery of them all: what happens to us after we die?

Joined by her ex-bouncer bodyguard James Doyle, she travels across the world searching for the elusive truth and delving deeper and deeper in the world of mystery and the macabre.

A Mind Screw comic book by Mark Waid. A second mini-series is coming out now called The Unknown: The Devil Made Flesh.

Tropes used in The Unknown include:

• Agent Scully: Cat. Though she believes in the human soul and that there must be some sort of afterlife, she refuses to believe in anything else supernatural.
• Deadpan Snarker: Both Cat and Doyle take turns with this.

Doyle: There's a gun in my carry-on!
Cat: You're not carrying now?
Doyle: Forgive me for not anticipating an Asian golem with needles for fingers!

• Defective Detective: Due to her tumor, Cat now has hallucinations. That's why she brings along Doyle, so that he can corroborate everything she sees.
• Great Detective: Cat Allingham.
• Here We Go Again: At the end of the first mini-series, Cat's travelled to the foot of Mt. Fuji to the "Suicide Forest" to investigate the death of an "angel." She says, "What else am I gonna do?"
• High Octane Nightmare Fuel: From the Asian golem with needles for fingers to the ever present man with the rictus grin and chalk-white face (is he a hallucination?), this comic will make you crap your pants.
• Knight Templar: Kerberos. He was charged with stopping anybody from opening the door to the afterlife and that's what he'll do. Even if he has to shoot a little boy.
• Occult Detective: Though Cat doesn't believe in the occult at all, still she ends up knee deep in it.
• The Watson: James Doyle (although he has good detecting skills of his own).