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Byrd (Hawaiian Dick)

kevinburtonsmith

Created by B. Clay Moore & Steven Griffin

“Thank God the Tiki Bar’s still open
Thank God the Tiki lights still shine
Thank God the Tiki Bar’s still open
Come on in and open up your mind…”
—John Hiatt

If Raymond Chandler had worn a few more Hawaiian shirts and learned how to chill, maybe Philip Marlowe may have turned out a little more like B. Clay Moore’s BYRD, the slacker detective hero of B. Clay Moore‘s comic book series entitled, appropriately enough, Hawaiian Dick.

Or maybe if Hawaii 5-O’s Jack Lord had inhaled a few times…

“The term we’ve sort of coined is ‘Tropical Noir,'” Moore explained to comic mag CBR News. “It’s a pastiche of pop cultural influences, attempting to bring some of the spirit of fifties’ noir to comics. Not as grim and dark as a lot of ‘noir’ influenced things out there. We’re trying to have fun with it, make use of the colorful locale without coming across as stereotyping. And, of course, we’ve thrown supernatural elements in for good measure. After all, it’s a comic book. We can do anything we want and the budget doesn’t increase a penny. So why not throw as much stuff into the stew as we can?”

Imagine a private eye so laid back he’s almost horizontal, a lot of rum drinks, bamboo, lounge music and fifties-era suburban kitsch rolled into the hard-boiled milieu, with a little voodoo woo-woo tossed in for spice, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what this series is like.

Byrd’s a disgraced former cop from the mainland with a past he’d prefer not to discuss (something about killing his own brother), trying to make a new life for himself in Hawaii. In the first arc, his old army buddy, Honolulu Police Detective Mo Kalama, tosses Byrd a stolen car case. But it turns out the car contains a package that was stolen from the island’s big shot drug lord, Bishop Masaki.

Moore assures us “There are plans for more Hawaiian Dick, and they seem pretty firm. If things go right, we should see a follow-up series featuring Byrd (and Mo) sometime later… We’re also in the process of working toward expanding Hawaiian Dick into other media, which we hope will encourage interest in the comic book.”

In fact, at one point Hollywood did indeed come sniffing around, and there was a lot of talk at one point about a possible flick set in Hawaii, possibly starring Jackass’s Johnny Knoxville.

But that’s just pie-in-the-sky. In 2004, a second mini-series, The Last Resort, made an appearance, continuing the same affable hybrid of booze-soaked slacker P.I. fiction and tales of things that go bump in the dark, and every now and then, another new series pops up, with Screaming Black Thunder in 2007 the most recent, Aloha, Hawaiian Dick, in 2016. A 100-page hardcover collection, Big Hawaiian Dick, featuring brand new, unpublished stories and other bonus material that would hopefully wrap up several loose ends, was promised. A Kickstarter campaign was launched in 2015, and soon reached its goal (and doubled it, in fact), but so far the book itself hasn’t seen the light of day.

Too bad–there was some great comic storytelling in this series, and some awesome art, as well. I wasn’t particularly jazzed about the increasing amount of supernatural stuff and unexplained plot twists that began to pile up as the series progressed, but by that point I was too hooked on the characters (particularly the Vette-driving, jazzbo, cocktail-swilling, high-flying Byrd) to quit.

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Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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