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Underworldmini-series

Underworld was a 4-issue police procedural mini-series created/written by Robert Loren Fleming and illustrated by Ernie Colon. A police procedural is a genre of fiction that is different from crime/detective fiction, in which it focuses on a police force (or in this case, a select number in the police force) and the activites they partake in as they investigate/solve a crime. Popular examples of modern day police procedurals on television include CBS Television Studios’CSI: Crime Scene Investigation or NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Streets.

I’m going to make an amateur speculation and presume that in 1987, in order to compete with the flood of new independent comics appearing on the direct market, DC began to get more experimental in it’s publishing selections. DC was now publishing more than just their ‘conventional’ super-hero titles - they were testing the waters for the revival of dormant comic book genres that they could hold a monopoly on (ex: sci-fi, pulp, fantasy, horror and sword & sorcery). DC was also publishing graphic novels and using the “suggested for mature readers” label more liberally in an attempt to gain the attention of the 'older comic buyer with money’ demographic that was so commonly found frequenting comic book shops. DC comics were not 'just for kids’ anymore. Crime comics (the predecessor of police procedural comics) were really popular in the 1940s and early 1950. They were so popular, in fact, that they were blamed for corrupting the morals of youth in Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent published in 1954. This, of course, caused a media backlash which ultimately led to the creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) and saw the drastic decline of crime comics in newsstands across North America (western comics pretty much filled the void crime comics left).

Historically speaking, police procedurals make for great TV shows and have been quite popular for as long as TVs have been broadcasting. Popular North American police procedurals during the 1980s include NBC’s Hill Street Blues andFox’s 21 Jump Street. It isn’t really a surprise to believe that DC would try experimenting with a new police procedural mini-series to see if there was a market for it.

Underworld really has nothing to do with the 'underworld’ (the title was misleading - I was expecting something about cop-killing mobsters) and deals primarily with the intertwined lives of four cops from a single precinct. The stories are self-contained (one story per issue), the characters have no interaction with the rest of the DCU (not even sure if they are in the same universe), the series is based on reality (so no aliens, monsters, super villains or etc), and the dialogue/content is unusually light-hearted for something marketed as being grim and gritty. The CCA seemed to have gotten more lax between 1954 and 1987, case in point: despite the images of blood and murder on the covers of this comic, every single issue has the CCA stamp of approval. The books give a lot of backstory to the characters and there is a sub-plot about a mysterious 'Knight Rider’-type fugitive car that runs through the mini-series that is never resolved, so I’m guessing Fleming left it open for the hope of an ongoing series. Unfortunately for Fleming, an ongoing series never materialized. Actually, this mini-series has pretty much been swept under the rug, as it was never collected as a reprint or trade paperback. DC would have much greater success with it’s Gotham Central police procedural ongoing series published in 2003.

Fun Fact: The longest-running police procedural comic strip/book to date is Dick Tracy.

Robert Loren Fleming had previously created/written the 1983 Thriller maxi-series and co-wrote an Ambush Bug mini-series with Keith Giffen before his published work on Underworld was released in 1987. He went on to work with Giffen again on Ambush Bug,Aquaman,Ragman and ultimately the Eclipso series where he would kill of a bunch of D-list superheroes in the early 90s.

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