The Big Shakedown #1 — Jordan Blum and Scott Koblish Uncover LA's Post-Quake Noir

Five years after the earthquake that wiped out Los Angeles, a down-on-her-luck PI takes a missing person case in the ruins of the City of Angels. Jordan Blum and Scott Koblish deliver a sunbaked noir thriller that feels like Chinatown meets the apocalypse.

There is a specific kind of tragedy in watching a beloved city die. Not the dramatic, explosive death of a blockbuster movie, but the slow, sunbaked decay of a place that refused to leave. Jordan Blum and Scott Koblish capture that exact feeling in The Big Shakedown, a new four-issue series from Dark Horse that trades the usual post-apocalyptic wasteland for something far more personal and deeply Californian: a Los Angeles that simply stopped functioning and decided to stay that way.

The setup is devastatingly simple. The Big One happened. It was the earthquake to end all earthquakes, so catastrophic that the government made the call not to rebuild. They walked away. But the people who loved the city—those who couldn't or wouldn't leave—stayed behind. Five years later, LA is a no-man's-land, a sprawling ruin where a third of the population has vanished into the dust. Into this broken landscape steps Ester Blanco, a former private investigator whose luck has run dry. She is looking for any ticket out of the wreckage, any way to escape the City of Angels before it swallows her whole.

That escape route comes in the form of a desperate father hiring Ester to find his missing daughter. It seems like a simple missing person case, the kind of gritty work that defined her career before the world ended. But in a city where people disappear as casually as traffic jams, the trail quickly goes cold and turns dark. What Ester uncovers is a tangled web of cults, conspiracy, and corruption that threatens every single survivor left standing. It is a story about the rot beneath the palm trees, where the real danger isn't the earthquake that already happened, but the people who thrive in the silence.

Visually, this book is a love letter to classic film noir, rendered through Scott Koblish’s sharp, expressive linework. Koblish, known for his work on The Despicable Deadpool, brings a kinetic energy to the ruined streets that makes the setting feel alive and breathing. The art captures the glare of the sun on cracked concrete and the shadows of abandoned skyscrapers, creating a vibe that feels straight out of Chinatown or The Long Goodbye, just with a layer of geological devastation on top. If you miss the detective stories of the 1970s that prioritized atmosphere over action, this is your ticket.

I would keep an eye on the main cover by Koblish; it’s a striking piece of art that sets the tone for the whole series, but the variant covers are shaping up to be equally compelling for collectors. This is the kind of book that rewards slow reading—you’ll want to linger on the background details of the ruined city. It drops in September, so it’s early to get your hands on it, but trust me, this one is going to sit on your shelf for a while.