This decade has been kind to comic fans of 30s- and 40s-styled pulp adventures. Mad scientists have been on the rise, and heroes from the earlier era of comics have been resurrected--with Marvel's Noir line and DC's recent First Wave initiative recalling a bygone era of comic storytelling.

Lately, the most successful endeavors involve combining the old stuff into a heady stew--a bit of Robert Howard and Lovecraft gives you Hellboy while mixing a bit of WWII-era war comics with steampunk invention gives you something like Atomic Robo. There is, of course, a greater breadth to the type of material being created in this era of neo pulp, but you get the idea.

It’s from this well that Larry Hama and Ryan Schifrin draw their inspiration for The Devil’s Handshake, a globe-trotting adventure comedy featuring an Odd Couple pair of leads--Moebius and Basil--who work for some manner of Lovecraftian horror that sends them on assignment to find artifacts for some nefarious purpose.

You already know the leads by their visual types--the one in the cabbie’s hat is the tough but sensitive one (Basil) while the one in the rakish fedora is the charmer who is more interested in chasing tail than cursed Maguffins. Likewise, when a tight-shirt-wearing curator for the New Zealand museum enters the mix (and shows a little bra) you know that she’ll turn out to be more than she appears.

The story has a lot of these familiar elements written and remixed for effect, which is perhaps the greatest strike against the book--it never really seems to develop its own personality by the conclusion of the volume. The two leads remain ciphers in spite of the ample interplay they have during the story. More often than not, they coast through as types, which makes any investment in their adventures hard to muster.

More worrisome is the formulaic nature of the adventure that has the duo hopping from point A to point B with villains in pursuit but no real sense of any stakes beyond the safety of the heroes’ own skin. The baddies have little if any connection to the heroes, making them somewhat vague (although they remain visually interesting). The idea that our heroes may not be working on the side of the angels is an element that’s left disappointingly under explored--as is their indentured servitude to their many-angled employer.

The book contains a three-page gallery of concept art for the characters and their world. In part, it looks like elements of a production pitch for a film or television series. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this work was connected to proposal for a feature film or television series as Schifrin is the book's Hollywood connection with feature films and work for the SyFy network under his belt as a writer-director.

There are some interesting elements to the world of Basil and Moebius worth exploring. Unfortunately, none of them was covered in this initial volume. Should Hama and Schifrin choose to revisit the world of this story, I hope they decide to draw it out in greater detail.

If you liked this review, be sure to check out more of the author’s work at Monster In Your Veins

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