Holiday Gift Guide: J.C.’s Suggestions
Each year in Scoop we try to offer suggestions for your Christmas or Hannukah shopping lists, and we keep it to ones that we can honestly and enthusiastically recommend. These selections are from Gemstone’s President, J.C. Vaughn, and they cover a fairly wide range of prices.
Geiger – Volume One
Image Comics; $9.99
Before comic book readers became aware that writer Geoff Johns and friends were building the Ghost Machine universe, he, artist Gary Frank, and colorist Brad Anderson introduced their first creator-owned Geiger to fans in a six-issue series from Image.
In the wastelands of an Earth ravaged by nuclear war years earlier, survivors must contend with “nightcrawlers” (dangerous, mutated creatures), the “Organ People” (who capture the relatively healthy as transplant donors), scarcity of resources, and more. Against this backdrop stands Geiger, “John Glow” or “the Meltdown Man.”
Johns and company have created a world that is compelling and populated it with characters that are equally intriguing. In the grand tradition of great comic books, the anticipation of each new issue begins the moment one finishes reading the previous one.
Since the robust launch of the Ghost Machine imprint, there’s now another Geiger series, but this collection is a great way to get into the story from the beginning. There is a more expensive hardcover collection which folks who are already fans may very well want to pick up. If, though, you’re just trying Geiger on for size, it’s hard to beat that $9.99 trade paperback.
Limited Edition: The Untold Legend of the Batman
DC Comics; $12.99
The first Batman miniseries, 1980’s three-issue The Untold Legend of the Batman, was the work of a group of masters of the craft, and very recently it was collected and offered for the first time in the large Treasury format. It’s a treat for those readers who remember it and also for those who can discover it for the first time.
Writer Len Wein teamed with pencil artist-inker-letterer Jim Aparo (John Byrne, doing his first DC work, penciled the first issue). José Luis García-López and Dick Giordano were paired to illustrate the three covers. The results were superb.
The plot isn’t anything revolutionary – Batman is confronted by a seemingly impossible mystery – but in the hands of Len Wein, it becomes a concise tour of the origins of Batman’s foes and allies as the Dark Knight deals with the threat at hand.
The art and Glyn Wein’s colors create a perspective that is simultaneously energized and haunting, and it truly benefits from being seen at this much larger size.
One note about that: in eBay listings we’ve seen this described as a “facsimile edition,” but that’s entirely incorrect. It was never in the treasury format before.
Partisan
TKO Studios; $16.99
When TKO first launched writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Epting’s Sara, it was offered as a complete boxed set of the six comic issues and a trade paperback. They featured solid production values and were oversized compared to most current comics. They were later followed by a beautiful hardcover edition.
Partisan, while a very different story from Ennis and Epting, is a spiritual successor or sequel to Sara. Both deal with women swept up in circumstances beyond their control on the Soviet side of World War II, and both confront the brutality of war, the totalitarian nature of the state, and the price of hoping for a better future.
Wonderfully illustrated and rich with characters and dialogue, Partisan is unsentimentally brutal, yet moments of humanity shine brightly amidst the horrors that confront Aleksandra, a blacksmith’s wife, when the German invade. She leaves to go fight the invaders, but that leaves her to protect their children.
The journey is far from clean-cut.
She, her children, and fellow survivors witness horror after horror as they strive to survive moment by moment.
As we saw with Sara, Ennis and Epting make a powerful team. The result is not light reading, but it’s as captivating as it gets.
Origins of Marvel Comics: The 50th Anniversary Edition
Gallery 13; $50
Editor Chris Ryall – a creative force in his own rite – is the former Publisher and President of IDW Publishing. He’s also a superfan when it comes to Marvel Comics of the 1970s and ‘80s (just ask him about Rom), and it’s hard to think of a better person to spearhead the 50th anniversary edition of Fireside Books’ Origins of Marvel Comics.
What Ryall has done with this already important book is a tremendous service to fans, historians, and collectors. Stan Lee’s original text was – as it’s been described – self-deprecating hype. Ryall’s additional material gives it a tremendous injection of context.
Coming just 13 years after the launch of Fantastic Four #1, Origins was the first hardcover and trade paperback that collected Marvel material, namely the origin stories for the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Doctor Strange – and it served as the gateway drug for many budding collectors in that era. The origin stories were paired with more recent (at the time) adventures of the same characters.
While the tales contained in the volume were nowhere near as pricey as they are today, they were already beyond reach for newer, entry level fans. In 1974, that year’s edition of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide noted the prices of each of the issues included in the book: Fantastic Four #1 ($70) and #55 ($1), Incredible Hulk #1 ($30) and #118 (40¢), Amazing Fantasy #15 ($40), Amazing Spider-Man #72 (40¢), Journey into Mystery #83 ($20), Thor #143 (40¢), and Strange Tales #110 ($3), #115 ($2), and #155 (60¢). Adding them up – if you could find them – only brought a total of $167.40 (in 1974 dollars), but Origins carried only a $6.95 cover price for the softcover.
It was a bargain that also came with the perceived legitimacy of being in the form of a book rather than an individual comic. And it was a hit. Origins spawned Son of Origins, Bring on the Bad Guys, and a whole line of Marvel collections for Simon & Shuster’s Fireside imprint.
The new deluxe, collector’s edition of the Origins of Marvel Comics includes a new Alex Ross take on the original cover, essays by Ryall, Tom Brevoort, Ross, and Larry Lieber, as well as an interview with Fireside editor Linda Sunshine. The book also includes a look at the marketing efforts for the original version, artist bios, and Ray Bradbury’s Los Angeles Times review of the volume from 1974, among the material crammed into its pages.
For fans of the original version, and for Marvel fans in general, it’s a tremendous way to make a landmark anniversary.
Terry and the Pirates: The Master Collection – Volumes 1-13
Clover Press; $100 each
Ever since Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates debuted in newspapers in 1934, writers have been trying to come up with adjectives to describe it. American Flagg! creator Howard Chaykin summed up the strip and its impact succinctly when he said, “In the first few years of Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff invented the visual and textual language that defines the very vocabulary of all adventure and character-based comic art… It is the greatest adventure comic strip ever done – a genuine masterpiece of its art form.”
The strip, of course, was collected previously. The Library of Comics (LOAC) produced a glorious complete set (beginning in 2007) that was at the time the gold standard of comic strip reprints. That incarnation, though, no longer holds the title. This new set one does.
The 164-page, 11” x 14” hardcover first volume in the series perfectly complements the other 12, so much so that the spines line up to form one complete image. The strips contained in each one are reproduced from Milton Caniff’s personal set of color syndicate tabloid proofs.
Those proofs, by the way, were not available for previous series, which ultimately means that is the best that this foundational action-adventure strip has ever looked. The dailies are crisp black and white, and the Sundays are the truest color ever reproduced compared to what was intended.
Truthfully, any student of comic storytelling can’t go wrong with any of the volumes in this series, but as events spiral toward the second World War, this one is particularly captivating.
“Bravo!” as usual to Dean Mullaney, Bruce Canwell, and their team at LOAC. My only word of caution is that if you start with one volume, you’ll end up wanting them all.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and good reading to you (or to the lucky recipient for whom you’re purchasing a gift this season)!
– J.C. Vaughn
Popular Topics
Overstreet Access Quick Links
Holiday Gift Guide: J.C.’s Suggestions
Each year in Scoop we try to offer suggestions for your Christmas or Hannukah shopping lists, and we keep it to ones that we can honestly and enthusiastically recommend. These selections are from Gemstone’s President, J.C. Vaughn, and they cover a fairly wide range of prices.
Geiger – Volume One
Image Comics; $9.99
Before comic book readers became aware that writer Geoff Johns and friends were building the Ghost Machine universe, he, artist Gary Frank, and colorist Brad Anderson introduced their first creator-owned Geiger to fans in a six-issue series from Image.
In the wastelands of an Earth ravaged by nuclear war years earlier, survivors must contend with “nightcrawlers” (dangerous, mutated creatures), the “Organ People” (who capture the relatively healthy as transplant donors), scarcity of resources, and more. Against this backdrop stands Geiger, “John Glow” or “the Meltdown Man.”
Johns and company have created a world that is compelling and populated it with characters that are equally intriguing. In the grand tradition of great comic books, the anticipation of each new issue begins the moment one finishes reading the previous one.
Since the robust launch of the Ghost Machine imprint, there’s now another Geiger series, but this collection is a great way to get into the story from the beginning. There is a more expensive hardcover collection which folks who are already fans may very well want to pick up. If, though, you’re just trying Geiger on for size, it’s hard to beat that $9.99 trade paperback.
Limited Edition: The Untold Legend of the Batman
DC Comics; $12.99
The first Batman miniseries, 1980’s three-issue The Untold Legend of the Batman, was the work of a group of masters of the craft, and very recently it was collected and offered for the first time in the large Treasury format. It’s a treat for those readers who remember it and also for those who can discover it for the first time.
Writer Len Wein teamed with pencil artist-inker-letterer Jim Aparo (John Byrne, doing his first DC work, penciled the first issue). José Luis García-López and Dick Giordano were paired to illustrate the three covers. The results were superb.
The plot isn’t anything revolutionary – Batman is confronted by a seemingly impossible mystery – but in the hands of Len Wein, it becomes a concise tour of the origins of Batman’s foes and allies as the Dark Knight deals with the threat at hand.
The art and Glyn Wein’s colors create a perspective that is simultaneously energized and haunting, and it truly benefits from being seen at this much larger size.
One note about that: in eBay listings we’ve seen this described as a “facsimile edition,” but that’s entirely incorrect. It was never in the treasury format before.
Partisan
TKO Studios; $16.99
When TKO first launched writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Epting’s Sara, it was offered as a complete boxed set of the six comic issues and a trade paperback. They featured solid production values and were oversized compared to most current comics. They were later followed by a beautiful hardcover edition.
Partisan, while a very different story from Ennis and Epting, is a spiritual successor or sequel to Sara. Both deal with women swept up in circumstances beyond their control on the Soviet side of World War II, and both confront the brutality of war, the totalitarian nature of the state, and the price of hoping for a better future.
Wonderfully illustrated and rich with characters and dialogue, Partisan is unsentimentally brutal, yet moments of humanity shine brightly amidst the horrors that confront Aleksandra, a blacksmith’s wife, when the German invade. She leaves to go fight the invaders, but that leaves her to protect their children.
The journey is far from clean-cut.
She, her children, and fellow survivors witness horror after horror as they strive to survive moment by moment.
As we saw with Sara, Ennis and Epting make a powerful team. The result is not light reading, but it’s as captivating as it gets.
Origins of Marvel Comics: The 50th Anniversary Edition
Gallery 13; $50
Editor Chris Ryall – a creative force in his own rite – is the former Publisher and President of IDW Publishing. He’s also a superfan when it comes to Marvel Comics of the 1970s and ‘80s (just ask him about Rom), and it’s hard to think of a better person to spearhead the 50th anniversary edition of Fireside Books’ Origins of Marvel Comics.
What Ryall has done with this already important book is a tremendous service to fans, historians, and collectors. Stan Lee’s original text was – as it’s been described – self-deprecating hype. Ryall’s additional material gives it a tremendous injection of context.
Coming just 13 years after the launch of Fantastic Four #1, Origins was the first hardcover and trade paperback that collected Marvel material, namely the origin stories for the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Doctor Strange – and it served as the gateway drug for many budding collectors in that era. The origin stories were paired with more recent (at the time) adventures of the same characters.
While the tales contained in the volume were nowhere near as pricey as they are today, they were already beyond reach for newer, entry level fans. In 1974, that year’s edition of The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide noted the prices of each of the issues included in the book: Fantastic Four #1 ($70) and #55 ($1), Incredible Hulk #1 ($30) and #118 (40¢), Amazing Fantasy #15 ($40), Amazing Spider-Man #72 (40¢), Journey into Mystery #83 ($20), Thor #143 (40¢), and Strange Tales #110 ($3), #115 ($2), and #155 (60¢). Adding them up – if you could find them – only brought a total of $167.40 (in 1974 dollars), but Origins carried only a $6.95 cover price for the softcover.
It was a bargain that also came with the perceived legitimacy of being in the form of a book rather than an individual comic. And it was a hit. Origins spawned Son of Origins, Bring on the Bad Guys, and a whole line of Marvel collections for Simon & Shuster’s Fireside imprint.
The new deluxe, collector’s edition of the Origins of Marvel Comics includes a new Alex Ross take on the original cover, essays by Ryall, Tom Brevoort, Ross, and Larry Lieber, as well as an interview with Fireside editor Linda Sunshine. The book also includes a look at the marketing efforts for the original version, artist bios, and Ray Bradbury’s Los Angeles Times review of the volume from 1974, among the material crammed into its pages.
For fans of the original version, and for Marvel fans in general, it’s a tremendous way to make a landmark anniversary.
Terry and the Pirates: The Master Collection – Volumes 1-13
Clover Press; $100 each
Ever since Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates debuted in newspapers in 1934, writers have been trying to come up with adjectives to describe it. American Flagg! creator Howard Chaykin summed up the strip and its impact succinctly when he said, “In the first few years of Terry and the Pirates, Milton Caniff invented the visual and textual language that defines the very vocabulary of all adventure and character-based comic art… It is the greatest adventure comic strip ever done – a genuine masterpiece of its art form.”
The strip, of course, was collected previously. The Library of Comics (LOAC) produced a glorious complete set (beginning in 2007) that was at the time the gold standard of comic strip reprints. That incarnation, though, no longer holds the title. This new set one does.
The 164-page, 11” x 14” hardcover first volume in the series perfectly complements the other 12, so much so that the spines line up to form one complete image. The strips contained in each one are reproduced from Milton Caniff’s personal set of color syndicate tabloid proofs.
Those proofs, by the way, were not available for previous series, which ultimately means that is the best that this foundational action-adventure strip has ever looked. The dailies are crisp black and white, and the Sundays are the truest color ever reproduced compared to what was intended.
Truthfully, any student of comic storytelling can’t go wrong with any of the volumes in this series, but as events spiral toward the second World War, this one is particularly captivating.
“Bravo!” as usual to Dean Mullaney, Bruce Canwell, and their team at LOAC. My only word of caution is that if you start with one volume, you’ll end up wanting them all.
Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, and good reading to you (or to the lucky recipient for whom you’re purchasing a gift this season)!
– J.C. Vaughn
Popular Topics
Overstreet Access Quick Links
