“I’ve been wanting to write a Kid Maroon story for years upon years now,” Cantwell said in a story accompanying the announcement. “Because Kid Maroon feels like me. It’s funny because I remember being a kid and how I couldn’t wait to grow up. Every day I feel like I grew up too fast. I often wish I could go back. Kid faces that same struggle in our book. Sure, his world is laden with pulp gangsters and killers, but he’s very much a child. This was always the undercurrent of the original Kid Maroon strips that Pep Shepard did. Sure, sometimes Pep occasionally had Kid rail against characters like Captain Pinko and write diatribes against Sales Tax, but at his best, those stories were always about a boy caught between worlds, his innocence always fragile, at risk of being shattered. That is the core of our book through and through."
“That wild boy was a compact version of The Spirit, Dick Tracy, and I don't know how many other pre-code pulp heroes,” added Santos. “But at the same time he was everything I would have wanted to be when I was a brat, sneaking into my uncle's room to read those crime comics which were supposed to be too violent for a kid to read.”
The graphic novel ties into recent trends for reviving newspaper comic strip characters such as Dick Tracy (see “New ‘Dick Tracy’ Series Coming from Mad Cave”) as well as retro-horror stories such as Jay Stephens’ Dwellings (see “Oni Announces Two ‘Dwellings’ Covers to Be Allocated”) and Patrick Horvath’s Eisner-nominated Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees (see “IDW Announces Sequel”).
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