Hawaiian Dick Volume 1: Byrd of Paradise Written by B. Clay Moore, Art by Steven Griffin and Published by Image Comics
Review Written by Shaun Daniels and Edited by Sharon Wong
We haven’t had this much Dick for $4.99 since…ok, we promise that that was the very last Dick joke. Comixology, one of the top digital comic book providers (for Android, iPhone/iPad and Web), has Hawaiian Dick Volume 1: Byrd of Paradise, the original 2002 Hawaiian Dick miniseries (a classic in our minds), available for a mere $4.99. The series has spawned two subsequent miniseries, and put B. Clay Moore and Steven Griffin on Horror Haven’s radar with their supernatural noir thriller. There isn’t a better deal out there in the ether of digital comics that is going to bring you this classic noir to your mobile electronic device.
For the few people out there who haven’t heard of Hawaiian Dick, it follows the life of Byrd, a former cop turned private dick in Honolulu. Byrd is hired to retrieve a stolen car and return it for $5,000. There are two things that are very important about the car in question; the first, the car isn’t even worth $4,000, let alone $5,000 and second, the car belongs to local drug Czar Bishop Masaki. This leads Byrd to suspect the car has a stash of drugs in it. With the help of his friend and Honolulu detective Mo Kalama, the two set off to Pali Highway to find the car with information from an informant. The one problem about the Pali Highway is that the local superstition warns of ghost warriors haunting a particular strip of the highway, sending people to their deaths. On the way, a gunfight ensues and the stolen car ends up off the road. Byrd and Mo find the car but it does not have drugs in it, rather the recently deceased Lelia Rose, the lover of Bishop Masaki. Now to make the situation worst, the previously mentioned ghost warriors show up, and they are real and very dangerous…and all this is in the first issue.
B. Clay Moore is at the top of his game with this series and is practically holding a writing clinic on high concepts in the pages of Dick. Moore captures post-World War II Hawaii perfectly proving his talent as a writer…hell, the man could write a comic book version of the phone book and we’d line up to read it. We would be remiss to not gush at Steven Griffin’s highly stylized artwork or his watercoloring. Griffin’s art is literally visual porn for the eyes.
If you haven’t read this book, now is the incredible chance to get started at a third of the cost of the first trade paperback.
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Feedback is always welcomed at shaun@horrorhaven.com and sharon@horrorhaven.com
