One of my favorite parts of the comic strip Calvin & Hobbes (and let me tell you, I have so many favorite parts of that amazing comic strip) were the recurring appearances by Calvin's persona Tracer Bullet, a detective trapped in a black and white noir with omnipresent narration that basically introduced a young Douglas Laman to the trappings of the noir genre. Of course, Tracer Bullet (God, that is such a perfect name for a detective meant to be a pastiche on noir protagonists) was building upon the legacy of many surely detectives before him, including Humphrey Bogart's lead character in the 1941 drama
The Maltese Falcon.
