“What do you know about Johnstown, Pennsylvania?”

“I know it rains.”

“Well grab your rain boots. I have a ransomware incident at Gotham Steel and I need your help.”

“Ransomware? Must be a day that ends in Y…”

Thus begins the new saga of Johnny Dollar, a fictional private detective turned insurance investigator whose old school, noir-ish, crime-fighting escapades are being reset decades into the future to tackle one of the most pressing and disruptive crimes of the digital age: digital extortion.

Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar began as a radio serial on Feb. 18, 1949. Johnny, a hard-boiled private dick in the mold of Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade, earned his paycheck solving crimes for hire, chasing down mafiosos, murderers and fraudsters. The series ran for more than 800 episodes on CBS Radio before eventually ending in 1962.

Today, his story is being relaunched in the form of a new comic book being created by Allan Liska, an analyst at cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Like Liska, the new Johnny Dollar will be spending his days investigating ransomware crimes and helping victims whose world has been turned upside down by ruthless gangs of criminals who use computers instead of guns to carry out their criminal schemes.

Liska – as he takes pains to point out in an interview – is not quite old enough to have caught show during its original run, but he does have fond memories of listening to old radio shows Sunday nights while studying as a high school student. He’d catch Casey Kasem’s Top 40, then switch over Superman and the Lone Ranger, but “my absolute favorite one was Johnny Dollar.”

Unlike Superman and the Lone Ranger, no one ever made a successful follow up about Johnny Dollar after it’s radio run (several short-lived efforts to make a TV show never made it past the pilot-stage), something that allowed the franchise to lapse into public domain.

That provided an opening for Liska to create a new version of Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, this time set in modern times and focused – like his work – on the scourge of…