Read Comics

Years ago, before I got back into Doctor Who fandom, I was pretty hardcore about Star Wars. My brother and I collected the toys, the books, the comics, but my interest petered about halfway through the Jedi Acadmey trilogy and the Dark Empire II comics. I also started back with Doctor Who collecting. Meanwhile, my brother has taken the Star Wars fandom to a higher level, continuing to by the books and getting some Star Wars tattoos.

Fast forward to now, and I’m looking through the trade paperback section at the library, and I decide to not just pass over the Star Wars collections, but actually look at them this time. The one that really caught my eye is a collection of the Marvel Comics Star Wars books. The Central Library had Volumes 6 and 7, but I was able to request Vol. 1, which I started reading yesterday.

Reading the initial six comics which were the adaptation of the 1977 movie brought me back to being a new comic fan in the ’70s. The adaptation is very faithful, but adds in the missing scenes that weren’t seen until decades later, the ones with Biggs and Jabba on Tatooine. I’m really grooving on Howard Chaykin’s art, thinking about how it’s changed over the years from this to the square jaws and huge racks in his recent run on Hawkgirl. It’s more subtle here, but again faithful to how the film looked.

As far as Roy Thomas’s writing, I’m still in the original adaptation, and haven’t yet gotten to the new stories. I remember loving them as a kid, but we’ll have to see how they hold up. I look forward to revisiting this part of my youth, and then maybe checking out some of the newer Star Wars comics.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, I picked up Batman: Snow because it is another book drawn by Seth Fisher, but this was almost entirely without the abstract style that I loved so much about Will World and Big in Japan. The art is still distinctively Fisher, but without the weirdness, it didn’t feel terribly special to me. There are some images with a lot of detail that I feel are particularly great, but overall the art is just good, but not especially noteworthy.

The story telling was pretty straight forward, and it’s a good story, so it was a quick and easy read. This basically just re-tells the Mr Freeze origin story, with some minor details twisted and changed around, and the added dimension of Batman trying to put together a crime fighting “team” of his own. At the end of the book, the team and batman part ways, but there is mention of how some members of the team want to continue working together, just not for batman… I haven’t yet found any reference to what or who they might have become.

I noticed that this book isn’t (yet) added to the wikipedia entry on Mr. Freeze, but I’m really too sleepy to do anything about it right now.

Overall, this is well worth a read, but I probably wouldn’t go out of my way to find it unless you’re really into Batman or Mr. Freeze.