Captain America and Daredevil

Captain America: The Swine by Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, Frank Giacoia and others (c. 1976): Jack Kirby's third, extraordinarily weird run on Captain America wraps up in this collection. Cap takes on an evil South American dictator (the Swine of the title), the Red Skull, freakish genetic engineer Arnim Zola (his face is on his chest, folks!), a vampiric space alien, and Magneto and a band of pretty much never-to-be-seen-again evil mutants. It's all good. Kirby's art was definitely starting to move into its later cubist stage here, which can be jarring at points, but the story-telling remains sharp and the odd and fascinating ideas continue to issue forth at about ten times the rate of most comic-book writer/artists. Zola's odd and frankly creepy design is almost worth the price of admission.


Daredevil Visionaries Frank Miller Volume 3 by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson and Terry Austin (c. 1982-83): 300 and Sin City creator Frank Miller finishes off his career-making first run on Daredevil here with a bang, as DD and the evil Ninja organization The Hand square off to determine whether or not super-assassin and former Daredevil girlfriend Elektra will be resurrected and, if so, whether she'll serve good and evil. Miller is credited as writer and 'storyteller' here, the latter indicating that he was doing very light breakdowns for the art that Klaus Janson would then draw and colour.

The collection gets off to a bit of a rocky start with the somewhat laughable "Angel Dust" storyline, but once Miller gets into the realms of more comic-booky crime, things settle down into solid standalones (the Stilt Man one-off being pretty funny) and the culmination of the Elektra/Hand/Bullseye storyline. Overall, some of the most accomplished and moodiest action-centric comic-book story-telling of the 1980's. As a bonus, two DD 'What if?' stories by Miller and an Elektra short from Marvel's B&W comics anthology Bizarre Adventures round out the proceedings. Miller's Kingpin is, as always, awesome, though little involved in the main stories of this volume except as an unlikely ally to Daredevil in his battle with The Hand. Miller also redesigns the Black Widow's costume here, though that too-close-to-Spider-man reboot wouldn't take.