Femme Noir

Christopher Mills and Joe Staton revived the noir genre with Femme Noir, a 2009 series from Ape Entertainment that follows a mysterious, hard-boiled heroine through dark, atmospheric crime stories. Staton’s crisp, shadow-drenched art perfectly complements Mills’s terse, pulp-inflected scripts, crafting a modern homage to classic detective comics. Though brief—a single issue—it stands as a sharp, self-contained example of how the creative team distilled decades of genre tradition into a tight, evocative punch.