What is Gaslight?
GASLIGHT is a graphic novel written by John McCullough with artwork by Alisa Laudanum. The first volume, "An Unkindness of Ravens," opens in April 1891 with the death of Sherlock Holmes and introduces Irene Adler, who comes to London seeking the truth about his death and faces an adversary even Holmes didn't imagine.

Irene Adler
GASLIGHT is the story of a woman's journey. That woman is Irene Adler, a character who has fascinated generations of readers of Sherlock Holmes. Introduced in the first Holmes short story "A Scandal in Bohemia," Irene is an opera singer described as having "the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men," which she proves by getting the better of Holmes in the end. For him, she is thereafter always "the woman," and he keeps her portrait on the wall at 221B Baker Street to remind him of her.

"A Scandal in Bohemia" makes it clear that Holmes is fascinated by Irene. Sherlockians have long shared that fascination (Irene lives on in her own adventures in the popular series written by Carole Nelson Douglas), and many have speculated that there was much more to the relationship between the detective and the diva than the story told. In GASLIGHT we learn the true depth of that relationship, revealed by the tragedy at Reichenbach Falls.

In the man's world of Victorian Europe, where she inhabits the demimonde between celebrity and scandal, Irene is an anomaly and an outsider: brilliant, independent, proud, and, in the Spring of 1891, devastated by Holmes' death. In "A Scandal in Bohemia" Irene threatened to cripple one of the royal houses of Europe over a five-year-old romantic slight. Now she has lost the love of her life, and nothing will stop her as she pursues answers-- and revenge.

The Sherlockian Game
There has existed for over 100 years a secular cult of Sherlock Holmes known as Sherlockians. Sherlockians are the original rabid fans, predating even Trekkies by 50 years or more and continuing to this day, who comb through the minutia of their chosen subject and spend endless time and energy speculating and expanding upon it.

The game of the Sherlockians, codified in William S. Baring-Gould's Annotated Sherlock Holmes and Leslie Klinger's updated version, is to treat every word of the Holmes canon (the original, Arthur Conan Doyle-authored stories) as the genuine reminiscences of Dr. John Watson (or Holmes himself, in a couple of the tales). In so doing, one must then explain the numerous inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical problems within the stories as a body - preferably inventing as pleasing as possible a theory as to "what's really going on!" to explain things. How many wives did Watson have, and what happened to them? How many James Moriartys were there? How could the Adventure of the Wisteria Lodge take place in 1892, when Holmes was believed dead by Watson and everyone else at Reichenbach Falls from 1891 to 1894?

Of all these problems, Sherlockians grapple most extensively with the matters of love and death. For love they rarely look further than Irene Adler, who so clearly stood apart from the rest of her sex in Holmes' eyes. For death, there is the question not just of what really happened at Reichenbach Falls in 1891, but in the three mysterious years between Holmes' disappearance there and his return in 1894. GASLIGHT starts from a Sherlockian's desire to answer these questions.

Holmes and the Supernatural
The world of Sherlock Holmes was one which stood "flat footed upon the ground" where reason and logic always triumphed; Holmes himself had no patience for the supernatural, believing it to be a sphere where his powers of observation and deduction would be useless. Some of the most effective Holmes tales suggested the supernatural (e.g. The Hound of the Baskervilles, the Sussex Vampire) but always ended with a "Scooby Doo" ending where all was explained as human artifice. As a reader, I always felt cheated by these endings, and longed to see Holmes up against bigger game. A century of "Sherlock Holmes versus Dracula" pastiches suggests I'm not alone.

GASLIGHT introduces the world of Lovecraftian supernatural horror into the world of Sherlock Holmes. H.P. Lovecraft's horror was introduced in the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and posited a supernatural world which could not be understood by reason, where "the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the mind to correlate all its contents." I love the idea of the rational Holmes universe, where reason is supreme, colliding with the unknowable horrors of a Lovecraftian universe. And again, I'm not alone, as the recent publication of Shadows Over Baker Street, an anthology based on exactly this theme, and the endurance of the "Cthulhu by Gaslight" RPG genre prove.

In a nutshell, GASLIGHT takes Sherlockian questions and provides Lovecraftian answers, and puts Irene up against a global criminal organization and an undead adversary with "all the powers of darkness at his back."