Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Dark Horse continues to make me happy with their release of STAR WARS OMNIBUS: A LONG TIME AGO... VOLUME 2, collecting issues 28 - 49, plus Annual #1 of the Marvel Comics series in beautiful remastered color. This is one of my favorite series of all time, and considering that the stories were regarded less and less as canon as time went on, it's a wonder that they are even being acknowledged, much less collected. Still, Lucasfilm will do anything to make a buck these days, so thumbs-up to them in this instance.
At the time issue 28 saw print, the release of The Empire Strikes Back was on the horizon, and series regulars Archie Goodwin and Carmine Infantino were taking the occasional break, allowing for other talents, such as Chris Claremont, Michael Golden, Mike Barr, Larry Hama, JM DeMatteis, and Mike Vosburg, to provide some variety. Even with these other creators joining in, the stories seem more tight as we get further into the series. The volume begins by concluding some earlier storylines featuring Valance the bounty hunter, Baron Orman Tagge, and that yellow-skinned Nimbanel who goes around calling himself Jabba the Hut - that's right, only one "t". Infantino's art still looks great, but Vosburg provides some absolutely beautiful pencils for Annual #1, and Goodwin and Golden squeeze in perhaps the most highly-regarded story of the series, "Riders in The Void", right before Goodwin and Al Williamson begin their exceptional ESB adaptation. As Williamson had passed on the opportunity to illustrate the Star Wars comic strips years earlier, to finally have him illustrate these characters on the comic book page was a real treat. You'll also see new colorful characters such as the conflicted Baroness Domina Tagge; Kharys, the Majestrix of Skye; the lost Rebel hero Cody Sunn-Childe; and the reclusive cyborg Kligson. It appears that after the ESB adaptation, there was an effort to make the main characters in the comic look more like the actors, perhaps due to heavier involvement from Lucasfilm. While Infantino returns to pencil several of the later stories in this book, his standard faces have been heavily altered.
Volume 2 contains some real continuity flubs that provide the occasional laugh, but I can't hold it against the writers, as they were simply working with what they were given at the time (if George Lucas truly had a grand plan from the beginning, as he claims, we see none of it here). So, kudos to Dark Horse for reprinting these stories, especially in an affordable digest format. It just goes to show that Marvel knew what they were doing when they took on this license. I'm hoping that we'll soon get to see some of the early non-Marvel material in these volumes, as promised by Dark Horse.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago... Vol. 2
Get 34% OFF
Click here for more information about Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago... Vol. 2
No comments:
Post a Comment