Deer in the Headlights is a story about booze, guns, drugs, cops, hookers, mobsters, thieves, and an unemployed cartoonist who gets tangled up with all of them. It’s Episode One of the Smalltime Comics series, halfway between a graphic novel and a noir crime thriller, with raw, primal language and art scrawled out onto a stack of cocktail napkins.

The assignment was a slap in the face. A car slams into an out-of-work artist at 2am and veteran NYPD Detective Abe Marion gets stuck with the case. But the more Marion poked around the less he understood, and what started as a simple hit-and-run quickly produced a dead body, a bunch of angry thugs, and some uneasy higher-ups within the New York City Police Department.