Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got 3 new comics plus a hard cover collection:

Jack Staff – 18

Echo – 5

Buffy Season Eight – 17

Runaways “Dead End Kids”

And now for a review of something I’ve read recently.

Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus Volumes One and Two

This isn’t going to be a review of Kirby’s Fourth World comics. They are pretty famous and have been reviewed and praised by a lot of people. I especially liked Walt Simonson’s introduction to the second volume. I figure if your interest in these comics, Kirby’s stuff from the early 1970’s when he jumped ship at Marvel and went to work for DC, hasn’t been piqued by now than nothing I say is going to make you go out and read them.

What I’m going to review is DC Comics choices in reprinting and presenting the material to us. First off these are collections of four comics: Jimmy Olsen, The Forever People, The New Gods, and Mister Miracle. Instead of choosing to publish them in four separate volumes, as the did when reprinting them in black and white a few years ago, they chose to print them together. That is, you get all four titles in chronological order as they appeared on the news stands in the 1970’s. So you get an issue of Jimmy Olsen followed by and issue of The Forever People followed by The New Gods and finally Mister Miracle. Then the rotation starts over. I’m not sure if that’s the exact rotation but you get the drift.

This was an interesting choice and I think it works well. The stories are all connected but in a more casual way than we are used to these days. In the 1970’s each story was meant to stand on it’s own yet still be able to continue from issue to issue. No thought was given to collecting issues into a trade paperback that made one big story on it’s own. That wasn’t invented yet.

Not having purchased these off of the newsstands I found it interesting to read them this way. I think that they make more sense like this. Not that they don’t make sense if you read all of the issues of The Forever People first and then move on to another series but since they all are meant to take place in the same “universe” it is cool to read them as the universe developed. All in all I think I prefer reading them this way.

The paper these are printed on concerns me a little. DC didn’t use the glossy stock of their usual hardcover archives. They uses a non glossy stock that’s thinner and lighter. That in itself doesn’t bother me but I don’t know what kind of paper it really is. It’s similar to a newsprint but not that crappy. I’d hate my fifty dollar book to turn yellow and fade in a few years like an old comic. That would really annoy me and I think there is a good chance it will happen.

But they sure are fun to read now.