Detroit in the late 1980s was the perfect setting for urban dystopian fiction. Its postindustrial landscape, rough street life, and corrupt politics not only inspired well-known classics like Robocop and The Crow, but also provided the backdrop for the early work of one of comic’s greatest art stylists, the late Tim Sale, best known for depicting a range of DC and Marvel characters including Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, and Captain America.
The Motor City looms large over Billi 99, an edgy, politically-charged action thriller written by Sarah Byam and originally published as a 4-issue miniseries in 1991 by Dark Horse. Acclaimed at the time of its release, garnering three Eisner Award nominations and selling reasonably well, the book went out of print for more than three decades despite Sale's later fame.
Last year, Byam and Clover Press sought to remedy this oversight, launching a Kickstarter campaign to print a new collected edition with colors by José Villarubia that ended up raising over $42,000. Kickstarter backers started receiving their books in December 2024, and the Clover Press edition is available now.
“I had almost no background in comics,” Byam told PW. “I was friends with Bill Messner-Loebs [The Flash, Adventure of Wolverine MacAlistaire] and shared a few of these gritty urban stories I had written. He looked at me and said, ‘Do you have any more of them?’”
Messner-Loebs connected Byam with other comics professionals including agent Mike Friedrich, who agreed to represent her, and editor Dick Giordano, who gave her pointers on how to make her literary-influenced prose stories more appealing in a comic market dominated by heroic genre stories.
At a time when there were few strong female protagonists in mainstream comics, Byam came up with Billi, a crusader for justice in near-future (1999!) Detroit, where civil and political rights were under siege by corrupt corporate interests. Billi defied then-current stereotypes of comic heroines by being petite and athletic, with a personality and sense of justice modeled on someone close to Byam’s heart.
“One of my earliest memories was of the 1967 riots in Detroit,” Byam recalled. “We were in the car and had to stop because a bunch of kids were fighting in the street with sticks and bats. My mother, bless her heart, was five feet tall and weighed 98 pounds soaking wet. She got out of the car and broke up the fight between the groups of boys. She told them, ‘Stop that right now! Your mothers would be ashamed of you! Go home!’”
DC showed interest in the pitch, but Byam ended up going with Dark Horse because they let her keep the rights. “Plus, Dark Horse didn’t need me to turn her into a bombshell,” she added. “It was important that she be strong, not sexy.”
With the publication rights nailed down, Byam went in search of a visual collaborator. When DC first expressed interest, veteran artist Gene Colan had been attached to the project, but his style was considered too old fashioned for this kind of story. Mike Friedrich suggested one of his other clients, Tim Sale, who was just breaking into the industry drawing independent and small press books. Byam saw a standalone illustration he had done of a medieval street scene for a comic called Thieves World and immediately fell in love with his ability to depict characters and settings with depth and authenticity.
“I moved from Detroit to Seattle while Bill99 was being created and Tim happened to live in the same neighborhood,” said Byam. said Byam. “His family and I were all politically active. His mother ran the local chapter of National Organization of Women. Tim was always quiet about his politics—I think Billi was maybe the most political piece of work he ever did—but I know he was very proud of the book.”
Sale was still evolving artistically at that time. He had not yet developed his distinctive, high-contrast look, and was using a process called duotone, rather than ink wash, to add shading and halftones to the linework. Byam said that this created a technical problem because the duotone yellowed with age and became very difficult to reproduce, which is part of the reason that the work had been out of the public eye for so long.
Following the acclaim that Billi 99 received in its initial release, Byam did a couple more projects in the comics industry and was invited to join the Vertigo imprint by editor Lou Stathis. “If I’d been smarter, I would have taken that opportunity, but I really didn’t understand what it meant to pay your dues,” she said. “I got in so easily, and I felt that at a certain point, they were asking me to start over from the ground up, after I already believed I had proven myself. So when [senior Vertigo editor] Karen Berger said she was willing to look at what I could write, I just said no thank you.”
Byam spent the next few decades doing other commercial work and working with her husband, cartoonist/illustrator David Lee Ingersol. She says she began discussions with Sale in the late 2010s about bringing Billi 99 back into print in a new, colored edition. “We talked about it for nearly five years before he died [in 2022]," she said. "We just couldn’t find a publisher who could fund doing the color.”
She says she approached several publishers including Dark Horse and Image, who suggested doing a Kickstarter. Soon, the San Diego, Calif.–based indie publisher Clover Press came into the picture and brought acclaimed color artist José Villarubia into the project. “Unfortunately, all that happened after Tim had passed,” said Byam. “But he and I had talked quite a bit about what we wanted to do with it, and I think he would have been very happy with the results.”
This article has been updated for clarity.
