It's alluring but ultimately unremarkable

Lookers: Allure of the Serpent (1999)
Script: Barry Gregory
Art: Pat Quinn

Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Sisters Michelle and Tanya Nichols, owners of and lead investigators for Complete Recovery Inc. (CRI), are hired to investigate whether or not it was the Loch Ness Monster is the creature that decapitated man on the lake's shore.

"Lookers" was a series from Avatar Press that ran during the late 1990s, in a string of one-shots, mini-series, and in the pages of the anthology title "Threshold". The title is a pun, as it focused on the adventures of a detective agency headed by a pair of beautiful sisters in their 20s, with Tanya being the pair's brawn and Michelle being the brains. Both were child prodigies, and they are generally the smartest people in whatever room they happen to be in.

The one-shot "Lookers: Allure of the Serpent" is a so-so example of their adventures. It's got an interesting set-up, but it is predictable in every way. The moment the Mort Sidney Company executive seeking to hire CRI mentioned cloning and the "Jurassic Park"-style attraction, I guessed that the "Loch Ness Monster" was their creation and that CRI was not so much being hired to investigate a gruesome death but to serve as a PR vehicle... and that guess was further validated when Michelle was established as an internationally renowned Loch Ness Monster skeptic who had published a scientific paper on the matter while still a child.

Despite its predictability, or perhaps because of it, "Allure of the Serpent" entertains in the same way a low-budget action movie or an episode of a TV drama does; it's enjoyable because you know what's coming (with perhaps a small variation). If viewed as an easily digested piece of formula fiction, "Allure of the Serpent" does it's job, nothing more and nothing less. Even the abrupt ending feels like the way a cheap movie or TV episode might close. (A one-page denouement at the expense of a house ad would have been nice.)

The art is passable, with Pat Quinn delivering some clean and crisp black-and-white drawings that generally keep the eye moving across the pages in the right direction and keeps the story flowing, even if the P.O.V.'s in  some of his panels don't quite make sense. Barry's Gregory dialog is also reasonable, always natural-seeming even with the plenty of wordy exchanges between some of the characters. Unfortunately, the speech balloons communicating those exchanges are sometimes  laid out in ways that are counterproductive to easy reading.

There are some random touches that I suppose are artifacts of how Avatar (and many other publishers) during the late 1980s and through the 1990s marketed their wares--with sex and nudity and more sex in the pages of the comics. Because, dontchayaknow--comics are for adults now!

In "Allure of the Serpent", we get a bizarre scene of a guy grabbing his girlfriend 's boobs at a time and place that makes no sense contextually nor reflects that dialog in the panels where it happens... and we're treated to a little full-frontal nudity courtesy of Tanya after she gets dunked in the lake by Nessie. While the second scene can be viewed as in keeping with the genre "Lookers" emulates, the first one is out of place and just a little gross.

I suppose I could also mention the fact that our heroines probably shouldn't have just worn swimsuits onto Loch Ness; I understand the water there is consistently fairly cold. (Although I could be wrong... and this IS a comic book after all. Skintight outfits are required for male and female characters whenever there's even a slight reason for one.)

In the end, like the low-budget action films it reminds me of, "Lookers: Allure of the Serpent" is entertaining but generally unremarkable... and perhaps the best thing about it is its poster (or cover in this case).