Hawaiian Dick vol. 2: The Last Resort

What I like most about the “Hawaiian Dick” series is that writer B. Clay Moore and artist Steven Griffin (with Nick Derrington) do such a great job of capturing the time and place of Hawaii in the 50’s.  The island atmosphere, the clothing style, the low-fi feel of the times — it’s all here.  They’ve also got a appealing cast of characters in ex-GI, ex-cop, current private dick Danny Byrd, his beefy cop buddy Mo Kahama, and his secretary Kahami.  Moore isn’t reinventing the wheel of private eye stories with these tales, but I enjoy reading them thanks to his handle on the characters and their stories and the artists’ skill at bringing this era to life.

The problem is that Moore also sees this series as “The Rockford Files” meets the “X-Files” (no, really, it’s in the pitch he made to Image for the series which is included as a welcome extra in this volume).  It’s not that I don’t think that such a mash-up couldn’t work, but that the creators here do such a good job making the world and the characters of the comic feel grounded and down-to-earth that these supernatural elements feel jarringly out of place.

This volume has Byrd and co. investigating a potential war between two resorts backed by the Italian and Irish mobs, respectively.  Byrd is called in by the Italians to find out who is sabotaging things on their end and things quickly spiral out of control after the bodies start piling up on both sides.  Now I think the “supernatural” elements worked a bit better in the context of the first volume because there was some ambiguity to them — if you wanted, you could work out a rational explanation for everything that happened.  Here, there’s no such ambiguity and the ghosts wind up derailing what started out as an effective crime story.  While I’d certainly be up for reading more stories involving these characters, I hope that if there is a next time Moore leaves anything that would require Mulder and Scully’s involvement back on the mainland.