Manhunter: The Deluxe Edition - Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson

In the summer of 1973, I drove up to Denton, Texas, to look for an apartment because I was attending what was then North Texas State University and didn’t want to live in the dorm again when the fall semester started. While I was there, I stopped by Fultz News Agency on the square downtown to check out the comic books and paperbacks. One of the comics I picked up was an issue of DETECTIVE COMICS with a new back-up feature: MANHUNTER, a revival of an old Golden Age character brought to the current day and enmeshed in a thriller/espionage plotline. It was written by Archie Goodwin, a writer whose work I enjoyed, with art by Walter Simonson, a relative newcomer.

I became a fan immediately, and since I was already buying DETECTIVE on a regular basis to read the Batman stories in it, I followed the Manhunter story as well and thoroughly enjoyed it. But it was designed to be a limited storyline, and after half a dozen backup stories and a full-length crossover with Batman, that was it. The whole thing came to an end, and while I remembered it fondly, I never reread it in the more than five decades since then.

However, recently I noticed that the digital version of the collected edition was on sale, so I picked it up and read the whole thing again. Sometimes that proves to be a mistake. A while back on Kindle Unlimited I noticed another series I’d read 50+ years ago that was written and drawn by one of my favorite comics creators (who shall remain nameless), so I revisited it. I read part of the first issue, said to myself, “This makes no sense at all”, and returned it. Sometimes you just had to be there when it was new.

Thankfully, that’s not the case with MANHUNTER. I still thought it was great. I love the way Goodwin and Simonson tied it in with the original Golden Age character. The plot is maybe a tad bit thin, but the scripts move right along and Simonson’s art is excellent. The crossover with Batman is handled well. There’s an epilogue by Simonson published after Goodwin passed away, a silent story with no dialogue but using the plot Goodwin and Simonson worked out, and it’s quite good, too. I was glad I gave this one another try. If you read it back then, maybe you should revisit it, too. If you’ve never read it but enjoy Silver Age DC, it’s well worth checking out.

By the way, I did find an apartment on that trip to Denton. It was a crappy little place on Normal Street, for those of you familiar with Denton. I lived there for a year, which was the only time of my life I could say with any justification that I lived on Normal Street. I didn't care for apartment living and commuted for the rest of my college career, even though it was a pretty long drive. I do have a few good memories from that year to go with the noisy neighbors and lousy plumbing.

Creepy Archives, Volume 1 - Archie Goodwin, et al.

The black-and-white Warren horror magazines just didn’t show up on the newsstands where I grew up when I was a kid. The first Warren magazine I remember seeing was VAMPIRELLA #27 in 1973. I picked it up, enjoyed it, learned of the existence of CREEPY and EERIE, and began seeking them out. I enjoyed them all. In fact, one of the first times my writing ever saw print was a fan letter published in an issue of EERIE. But I was very late coming to these magazines and never saw the early issues, although I came across an occasional reprint of a story from them.

Now those early issues are being reprinted in very handsome volumes, so out of curiosity more than anything else, I picked up Volume One of the CREEPY ARCHIVES, which reprints issues #1-5 of the flagship Warren title. They have great covers by Frank Frazetta and Jack Davis. The artwork on the stories themselves is by Reed Crandell, Gray Morrow, Angelo Torres, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando, Jack Davis, and Alex Toth. It’s just magnificent, stunning, however you want to describe it. Just great stuff, story after story.

Most of the scripts are by Archie Goodwin, who was also the editor of the magazine. Otto Binder contributes the scripts for two installments of an adaptation of his pulp series about Adam Link, Robot, and there are a few other stories by various hands. And here’s where I’m going to annoy some fans. As much as I love Archie Goodwin’s work (the Manhunter series he and Walt Simonson did is fantastic, and he wrote a lot of other great comics), I didn’t care much for the stories in this volume. These short, twist-ending tales are very formulaic and predictable, and even spacing them out over several months, as I did, the sameness bothered me. I know, I’m being hypocritical. Anybody who loves the Spicy pulps as much as I do shouldn’t be complaining about anything being formulaic. But that’s the way this book came across to me, great art but mediocre stories. Quite possibly you had to be there, and if I’d been buying the individual issues at the drugstore and reading them when they were new, I might feel completely differently about them.

Anyway, if you’re a fan of these magazines, this is a beautiful book and probably well worth your time and money. Whether I’ll continue picking up these Archives editions, I don’t know. I might give the second volume a try.