Big Nose began as a pastiche of the 1897 Edmond Rostand play, Cyrano de Bergerac.
Serrano's homely nose made him an unlikely romantic hero who thus composed love poetry for a better-looking associate.
The stories are unrelentingly violent, and often intentionally amusing, providing a unique fictional take on Chicago's gangland and the latter years of Prohibition.
As the series progressed, the Cyrano angle was dropped, and Serrano became an unlikely crusader against the social ills of the Depression, albeit applying the gangster's methods of violence, kidnapping, and murder to the problems.
Writing under a Standard Magazines house name, he authored some of the lead novels in The Phantom Detective.