Guest Reviews - Finding Gold (sort of) and High (yeah, I went there) Bronze in the Late Bronze Age: John Law, Shining Knight, and Darklon

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.

 

The other two stories focus more on the Nubbin character, with John Law in a more supporting role, i.e., he sort of steps in and saves the day at the last moment. Again, these will be familiar to anyone who’s read Eisner’s Spirit strips that focus on any of his several boy sidekicks (not just the unfortunate Ebony). This book is definitely worth getting if you’re a fan of Eisner’s work (like I am), and I think it’s pretty easy to find for next to nothing (my copy carried the hefty price tag of 80 cents a few years back).

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.

I’m also happy that these reviews highlight some of the independent publishers that became quite active in the 1980s and gave started releasing a lot of creator-owned material. Pacific in particular did a few other books similar to Darklon, i.e., they collected and reprinted some of the more obscure comics work from the 1970s by popular artists like Jeffrey Catherine Jones, Bernie Wrightson and Arthur Suydam.