Let's get one thing straight – Lobster Johnson isn't that great a read. Like the old Bat character, like any flippin' dust-em-up inter-war vigilante, he's dark and brooding, and while he's allowed to know all about and fully expect the occult side of his world, he never really engages with it that successfully. The Burning Hand, for one thing, has an unkillable source of black flame – and a hoard of cannibals sitting around in a mansion just waiting for someone to crop up, by the sound of things – and he does nothing himself to counter it but shoot and kick and thump.

This collection has Caput Mortuum, where dastardly Nazis think of using dirigibles for a nuclear bomb-styled poison gas attack, the title story, involving dodgy medical experiments and our unkillable Lobster finding a stash of murder victims, Tony Masso's Finest Hour, which clearly is nobody else's, A Scent of Lotus, with a 'witch' affecting some Japanese gangsters' slightly better intentions, complete with her gang of gun-toting monkeys, and the Prayer of Neferu. And once again – no surprise – it's the occult (resurrected Egyptian priests) countered by grenades and shooty-shooty stuff.

Oh and you also get the feel these monster-of-the-month shorts were never the right way for the books to go, either – while the longer Burning Hand had stereotypes galore it felt richer than these over-too-quickly little pieces, which really are on the more forgettable side.