Radiant Comics

I’m back from the comic shop this week and I got no new comics but I did get a hard cover collection:

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

I saw this one on the stands when the individual issues were being published but I wanted to wait for the hard cover collection as I have for the last two Richard Corben drawn Marvel Comics series I bought. This one never made it to hard cover; probably because there was no Poe or Lovecraft tie-in like the previous two. So I bought this trade paperback collection.

“Starr The Slayer” is a barbarian comic and I really didn’t expect much from it except some good Corben art. That is pretty much what I got. Some nice Corben art and story telling.

The plot is a mixed bag. Parts of it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. It mixes the story of Starr with the story of an author of books about Starr. It’s kind of a fictional world meets real world sort of thing but that is only a minor part of the plot. I’m not quite sure if they needed it. The main villain had some weird motivations at times too. It seems to me that if he had just left Starr alone the villain could have gotten away with a lot more.

The script did one thing that I really can’t stand. Parts of it are written in rhyme. Rhyme works great in songs and poetry but I don’t think it ever works well in comics. It makes the words more important than the words and pictures together and takes me out of the moment. I couldn’t wait for the rhyming parts to end. Rhyming in comics should be banned.

There were some laugh out loud moments in the story. And lots of cursing and violence. Over all “Starr The Slayer” was a solid effort. Corben’s art was the best thing about it as the man can just plain tell a story even if the story in question isn’t necessarily spectacular. Give it a read if you’re a Corben or barbarian fan.