Doug: Happy Monday, kids! Rainy Days and Mondays... you know what I'm saying! But today we have a gaggle of reviews from our resident Balkan. He quipped to us in an email that his intent was to write in the 100-Word Review format, but soon found the handcuffs to be a bit too tight. So today, with a little expansion, the musings of Edo Bosnar --
Edo Bosnar: The year 1983 was a good time for reprints, apparently, and here’s a review of three reprint books
I have in my collection that all came out that year. The first two collect some
classic material from the late ’40s and early ‘50s by industry legends Will
Eisner and Frank Frazetta, while the last one contains some pretty obscure
stories by the no less legendary Jim Starlin.
First up: John Law, Detective. Published by
Eclipse, this book contains three stories done by Will Eisner in the late 1940s
featuring a then new character he was trying to develop. No publishers were
interested at the time, and he ended up redoing them for the Spirit newspaper
sections, while these originals were put into an envelope and forgotten until
Eclipse editor-in-chief cat yronwoode (that’s not a typo, she deliberately
signed her name like that back then) found them in Eisner’s archives years
later and had them published.
Visually,
John Law is virtually indistinguishable from the Spirit – basically Eisner
wanted a character who was a normal cop, not some guy pretending to be a ghost
and wearing a domino mask (John Law wears an eye patch instead). The stories
therefore match the style and tone of the popular Spirit shorts – there’s even
a little boy sidekick, a shoeshine named Nubbin who is, thankfully, not a
caricatured stereotype like the Spirit’s Ebony.
Of the three
stories, the first, “Sand Saref” is the best – 
and probably familiar to those
who’ve read Eisner’s Spirit stories, since Sand Saref was an occasionally
recurring character in them. Basically, it’s the origin tale of Sand, a childhood
friend of Law’s who went down a different path and eventually ended up leading
a globe-trotting life, often engaged in none-too-legal activities, before
coming back to their hometown. Like a lot of Eisner’s stories, it almost works
as a storyboard treatment for what could be a good noir film.
Next: Masterworks Series of Great Comic Book
Artists, nos. 1-2, published by DC together with Sea Gate Distributors.
These two books reprint the Shining Knight and other stories drawn by Frank
Frazetta that originally appeared in Adventure Comics in 1050-51. I’m a fan of
Frazetta’s art, so I really like these simply because they’re so nice to look
at 
(by the way, someone posted a video on YouTube with a page-by-page overview of the first issue in case anyone’s interested).
The stories,
however, are pretty average, and if the art wasn’t so nice they would be
entirely forgettable. 
No writer credits are generally cited in the book, so I
had to look it up on the GCD, and found that the Shining Knight stories were
written by one Joseph Samachson, who was also the co-creator of
the Martian Manhunter and otherwise a research chemist and university
professor! None of that comes out in these stories, unfortunately, and they
quite surprisingly contain much of the typical Golden/Silver Age wonky science
among other things. A case in point, one story involves a con-man who sells
what he claims is the Shining Knight’s winged horse – and he manages to fool
his marks (mainly gullible rich guys) because he has very real-looking fake
wings with small jet packs under them mounted on the horse, which allows it to
glide for a short distance. Needless to say, the reader is left with the
question that often arises with these criminal geniuses in comics: why doesn’t
he just patent that impressive technology and make a fortune, instead of
running scams or trying to take over the
world?
This brief
review is going to run a little long, just because I have to highlight what is
by far the best story in these two books. 
It’s an extra in the second issue, an
SF tale written by Gardener Fox (who is credited). It starts with some
mysterious spores from space falling to Earth and kick-starting a new ice age
that devastates much of the planet.
Astronomers
eventually learn that they came from the none other than the asteroid Ceres – I
found this amusing as I was re-reading this just as the news broke that the
Dawn spacecraft approaching Ceres had photographed what looked like lights on
it. The story also has a very darkly ironic ending, as Earth’s scientists figure
out that the spores are a source of infinite energy, and use it to power
machinery that not only reverses the ice age but also helps rebuild human
civilization – and propel a rocket that is launched to blow up Ceres.
Afterward, they find out that the inhabitants of the asteroid actually sent the
spores to Earth to keep us from using atomic energy and destroying ourselves.
Definitely a twist worthy of the Twilight Zone.
And finally: Darklon the Mystic, published by Pacific
Comics. This one collects five stories by Jim Starlin about a cosmic character
called Darklon that originally appeared in various issues of Warren’s Eerie
magazine from 1976 to 1979. 
As far as I know, these stories were originally
black-and-white, so they were colored for this Pacific edition. The tale begins
with the titular space-faring character tracking down a group of assassins who
tried to kill him; he kills each one of them in turn, sparing the last one long
enough to find out who sent them (spoiler: his father). So this is the kind of
fare we’ve come to expect from the writer of those cosmic Warlock and Captain
Marvel epics: a powerful and determined yet grim and troubled protagonist
involved in a dark tale of retribution and
inevitable destiny with lots of cosmic magic thrown in (and it gets pretty
dark, and also quite weird at a few places). Of these three titles that I’ve
reviewed here, I have to say I like this one the best. It’s Starlin doing what
he does best, and the story is engrossing, while the art is spectacular. By the
way, I know many people don’t like it when black-and-white stories are later
colored, but the coloring here was very nicely done and it really serves the
story well.