Essential Captain America Volume 2 (1968-1970/ Collected 2004): written by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Jim Steranko; illustrated by Jack Kirby, Jim Steranko, Gene Colan, John Romita, Joe Sinnott, Syd Shores, and others: The great transition period of Captain America begins here, as co-writer/penciller Jack Kirby gives way to Jim Steranko gives way to John Romita gives way, finally, to Gene Colan, who would stay on the book for a few years as penciller.
Early red-giant-phase Stan Lee writes Steve Rogers, Captain America, as such an angsty bastard that the book occasionally shudders to a halt, bloated and inert and over-stuffed with bathetic self-pity. Redemptively, the art is good throughout, and Steranko's innovative lay-outs are such a show-stopper that they've been collected and re-collected on numerous occasions. I don't know that the Gene Colan/Joe Sinnott art team ever entirely works for me -- Sinnott's inks normalize Colan's pencils a bit too much, make them a bit too smooth.
It's 1968 when the collection begins, and Kirby and Stan Lee are clearly producing too much material at the time -- Lee's writing is well into its state of decay. Kirby is still great, but he's decreased the number of panels per page already, as he did on all of his Marvel books in the late 1960's. It makes for more interesting visual storytelling but also a real and notable decrease in content. Cap's African-American pal The Falcon makes his debut here. Once Kirby and Steranko leave, the new villains become ridiculous, as Lee flounders to create interesting villains and mostly fails. Recommended.
Doc Savage: The Spider's Web (2016/ Collected 2016): written by Chris Roberson; illustrated by Cezar Razek: Writer Chris Roberson nails venerable pulp hero Doc Savage much more effectively in his second go-round on the Man of Bronze's adventures for Dynamite Comics. Cezar Razek is a pleasant, straightforward cartoonist. I wish Dynamite would put an artist more, well, dynamic, on the new adventures of Doc Savage. So it goes. Any time Doc has to deal with an Earthquake Machine is all right with me. Recommended.
Batman '66 Volume 1: written by Jeff Parker; illustrated by Jonathan Case, Mike Allred, Ty Templeton, Joe Quinones, Sandy Jarrell, and others (2013-2014/Collected 2014): One of DC's first forays into Digital-first original comics is a jolly romp set in the universe of the 1960's live-action Batman series starring Adam West, Burt Ward, and several thousand 'Bams' and 'Pows.' It's fun and cheeky and campy. The art tends more to the cartoonish than the photo-representational, which was probably a good idea. And the cartoonists, like writer Jeff Parker, keep things light. Recommended.
Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD: written by Jim Steranko, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Roy Thomas; illustrated by Jim Steranko, Jack Kirby, John Buscema, Frank Giacoia, Joe Sinnott, and others (1966-68/ Collected 2000): Why Marvel didn't just complete the Jim Steranko Nick Fury run in this 2000 collection with the last 80 pages or so of Steranko's fun and innovative 1960's work on the company's master spy is a good question. They rectified that error 13 years later with a all-in-one volume, the one you should probably buy. But this was a remainder and cheap.
Writer-artist Jim Steranko managed to make the S.H.I.E.L.D. series into a groovy blast of science fiction, fantasy, and suspenseful super-heroics. He got traction as a comics artist and writer remarkably quickly, and his art background from beyond comics seemed to help motivate him to try innovative lay-outs and visual effects and combinations of photographic and drawn material. Many of the subsequent 'young turks' of comic-book art would follow in Steranko's footsteps, leading to the 1970's and its pantheon of young and exciting comic-book artists.
As Steranko gained more experience and confidence, the stories got wilder and weirder. A two-page spread that reveals the mastermind behind parodically stereotypical Asian super-criminal the Yellow Claw causes everything that comes before it to make a totally new, weird type of sense. It's as if Philip K. Dick had decided to write a superhero comic book -- and Steranko's ESP SHIELD Unit suggests, in its goals and its three-person composition, that Steranko was familiar with the Dick novella "The Minority Report."
So too Dick's concerns with the nature of reality. There were already an awful lot of human-like robots running around the SHIELD series when Steranko came on board. That problem just multiplies, along with hidden bosses, mysterious traitors, and the occasional spot of interstellar travel and alien invasion. SHIELD's 1966 technology, and that of their evil counterparts AIM and Hydra, far surpasses that on the current TV show. So too the zippiness and the awesome weirdness of the scenarios.
It's the art and all its experiments that still sings, however, Steranko's occasional flatness when to came to the human form notwithstanding. Whether it's the photo-collage techniques he picked up from Kirby and refined on his own or the audacious four-page spread that required one to buy two copies of a SHIELD comic to see it in its entirety, the artwork showed a variety of ways that mainstream comics could be their own peculiar form of avant-garde Pop Art without a Lichtenstein to appropriate the images for the art world. Highly recommended.
