Spencer and Locke is a comic written by David Pepose and drawn by artist Jorge Santigo Jr. with the premise "What if Calvin grew up in Sin City and became a police detective?"
Answer: Locke is a massively screwed up Determinator, suffering from trauma brought about at the hands of his Abusive Parents, a Barbaric Bully, and a hateful teacher, among other authority figures in his childhood. The one light in his life was Sophie Jenkins, a girl he knew from when he was very young...
And now, she's turned up dead, causing Locke's life to derail once again. His only friend in life is his stuffed panther who may or may not exist, and together, they have to work together to find Sophie's killer.
As of writing, Spencer and Locke has had two volumes released; while Volume 1 is thoroughly a pastiche of Calvin and Hobbes and its characters, Volume 2 contains pastiches of several other funny pages characters, most prominently Beetle Bailey. A third volume, which was meant to have elements of of Peanuts and Garfield was announced in 2019, but there hasn't been any news since.
Provides Examples of:
- Abusive Parents: Locke was regularly beaten by his mother, and ends up killing her in self-defense.
- Art Shift: The flashbacks to Locke's childhood are drawn in Bill Watterson's style, making the realistic trauma Locke experiences in them so much worse.
- Babysitter from Hell: A much darker version than most. It's all but stated that Locke was molested by his babysitter Ramona. Spencer is terrified of her, and rightfully so, as Locke's encounter with her in adulthood causes Spencer to outright demanifest into a cloud of black smoke.
- Big Bad: Augustus Locke, Spencer's father.
- Broken Pedestal: Zig-Zagged. In the final issue of Volume 1, Locke's father tells him that Sophie was a drug mule, selling to schools throughout the city. The sheer horror of this claim causes Locke to tackle his father through a balcony. By Volume 2, Locke essentially doesn't care who Suzie was, and is just trying to make a good life for himself and their daughter, Hero.
- Bond One-Liner: The last page of Volume 1 has Locke make this meta quip to the culprit:Locke: We'll see you in the funny pages.
- Children Forced to Kill: Locke shoots his mother when she comes after him with a broken bottle. Then at the climax Hero has to do the same to one of Augustus' mooks. Unless Spencer helped pulled the trigger.
- City Noir: The unnamed city Locke operates in seems to follow this. There are only a handful of scenes in daylight and the entire town is run down and grubby.
- Crapsaccharine World: Locke's childhood as he remembers it.
- Dark Fic:
- To Calvin and Hobbes; the negative aspects of several characters are exaggerated. While various authority figures in Calvin's life were strict with him, they were never as abusive as Locke's parents or babysitter, or outright murderers like Ms. Scabtree. As a result, Locke himself displayed Troubling Unchildlike Behavior in his youth, making him a much darker parallel to Calvin. Not even Calvin's Imagine Spots are safe from this treatment; the Spaceman Spiff analogue here is portrayed as being the result of Locke being in a drug-induced psychosis.
- Volume 2 expands this to the whole of comic strips as a medium; Roach Riley is a pastiche of Beetle Bailey, who completely snapped after his whole platoon was killed, he was held as a POW under horrific conditions, and both his wife and their unborn child were killed in an accident before he could come home, who murders several other pastiches (including one of Dagwood Bumstead and versions of Les Moore and Dick Tracy) in an attempt to destabilize the city.
- Expy: Being a (sorta) Affectionate Parody of Calvin and Hobbes almost every character is this. Locke is Calvin, Spencer is Hobbes, Sophie is Suzie, Mrs. Scabtree is Mrs. Wormwood, and Augustus is Calvin's unnamed father.
- Imaginary Friend: Spencer... maybe.
- Intrepid Reporter: Volume 2 introduces journalist Melinda Mercury as a love interest for Locke, and she's responsible for driving the story forward at several points while Locke does the legwork. Her inspiration isn't as obvious as others in the story; Melinda is meant to be a pastiche of Brenda Starr, who is arguably far more obscure to a modern audience than Calvin and Hobbes.
- Made of Iron: Locke, per the genre. He survives and rapidly recovers from several punishing fistfights, a car crash, being shot in the shoulder, and a drug overdose that was supposed to give him a fatal heart attack.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
- For the most part Spencer is treated as a figment of Locke's imagination, except that at one point Locke orders Spencer to drive their car while in the middle of a shootout, and Spence appears to be acting independently while looking for Locke when the latter is wandering in hallucinatory state. Muddying the waters further is the fact that Spencer appears in Issue 4 of Volume 1 in order to defend Hero from one of Augustus's thugs... only to have the final panel of this sequence show Hero holding a smoking gun.
Spencer: I'll tell you something I always told your dad... I'll always be as real as you need me to be. - Mushroom Samba: One of Augustus' minions pumps Locke full of drugs to fake an overdose death, and Locke starts seeing the world as "Raygun Reynolds" an expy of Calvin's Spaceman Spiff persona.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Augustus tries to pull this on Locke, claiming the detective is no better than a drug dealer after shooting Locke's mother when she tried to attack him with a broken bottle.
- Police Brutality: Locke engages in some Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique with Stanley, when the latter initially refuses to talk.
- Locke: (opening a bag full of tools) "I call it Convict Ball. It's never the same game twice."
- The Reveal: Sophie's child, a girl named Hero, was fathered by Locke.
- Schoolyard Bully All Grown Up: Stanley, Locke's childhood nemesis, has gone from beating up kids for their lunch money to funneling drugs and raping women.
- Shout-Out:
- Like the character she's parodying, Mrs. Scabtree is named after another character from The Screwtape Letters.
- Lana Forrester in Volume 2 is a parody of Lois Flagston from Hi and Lois; not the first time in comics that a woman named Lana has subbed in for a woman named Lois.
- Take That!: A poster adorning the science museum in Volume 1, Issue 4, reads "AN ACTUALLY GOOD MARVEL".
- Talking Down the Suicidal: Spencer has to talk down Locke during his childhood, when the latter almost jumps off the roof of a building.
- Trauma Conga Line: Roach Riley in Volume 2. All of his friends are killed, he's tortured in a POW camp for months on end, he's forced to commit cannibalism after not eating for weeks and then is rescued immediately after he's done chowing down on the Chaplain, and when he comes back home, he finds that his wife and unborn child have died in an accident. Combine that with Hal Forrester gaslighting him into thinking that he was a manifestation of his dead commanding officer in order to gain more political power in the city by using Roach as a living weapon, it's no wonder he's completely fucked.
- Wham Line: When Locke accuses Augustus of murdering Sophie.
- Augustus: "Killed her? You idiot... Why would I kill my own courier?"
- Worthy Opponent: The reason Roach spares Hero in Volume 2. Roach planted nine bombs around the city, only one of which Hero knew about, but successfully defused. Roach says she has more guts than half of the city combined, and despite having a gun to her head, decides to spare her for being willing to at least try.
