Former basketball superstar, actor, and Washington Post columnist; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has decided to add something else to his long job title; comic book writer. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has a passion for the mythology of Sherlock Holmes, wants to explore the career of Holmes' lesser known but the smarter older brother; Mycroft, in comic book form.
And I know what some of you all are thinking, “Sherlock Holmes had a brother?” For avid Sherlock Holmes fans, you might know Mycroft as a pudgy, out of shape guy with a disdain for fieldwork. In these new stories, however, he is a strapping young patriotic adventurer. The series follows the elder Holmes as he travels the world on a mission from the British government to try and stop a madman focusing on the destruction of civilization by means of an impossible technological advancement. And to top it off he plans on embarrassing Queen Victoria in the process as if he could not be any more detestable.
This won’t be the first time Kareem has tackled the character of Mycroft. In September 2015, he wrote the prose novel Mycroft Holmes for Titan's book line with screenwriter Anna Waterhouse, the story chronicles Holmes' first adventure in the name Queen and Country.
Abdul-Jabbar’s writing career predates professional basketball when he worked as a journalist during his high school years for a Harlem arts program. In regards to the Holmes mythos, Kareem said this in an interview with SLATE: “my interest in the Holmes brothers developed because I realized I already had an affinity with the way they saw and analyzed the world,” he says. “I was only in my early 20s when I started playing as a pro and knew I had a lot to learn about the world. I had a lot of time on planes, in airports, and in hotel rooms, and I used much of that time to read.”
