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Terry Hooper-Scharf

Friday 22 April 2011

Collected:The Fighting American




The Fighting American
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby
Titan Books
Dimensions: 258 x 170mm
Paperback: 200 pp
ISBN: 9780857681157
£14.99/$19.95
Publication date: 27 May 2011


The complete adventures of the quirky Cold War superhero, launched in 1954 by the creators of Captain America, are presented here in an affordable graphic novel format, with weird and wonderful characters like Yucha Liffso, Jiseppi the Jungle Boy, and Poison Ivan! This volume boasts a new introduction by co-creator Joe Simon as well as previously unpublished stories and covers!


A good few years back I purchased a hard cover edition of The Fighting American.  Slightly damaged but a real gem.  When I opened this package from Titan Books I thought “Oh, at least I have an undamaged book now!”  However, I then thought that it seemed a lot thicker.


I’m very clever.  I checked the Titan press release and found that this book had far more pages than the hard cover edition.  Some two hundred pages of pure Simon and Kirby.


But better still: this collection contains every Fighting American strip that Simon and Kirby produced…with one exception.  As Joe Simon points out:
 
“The volume you hold in your hands contains every Fighting American story we ever produced, with the exception of one page from “The Mad Inker” that to this day is missing…”


This is a bloody gold-mine for any comic collector with taste!


Deadly serious adventures but with tongues firmly in their cheeks –as with “Super-Khakalovitch..Boy Has-Been!” and the lovely “Sneak of Araby”.  Then you have the almost sci-fi “Home Coming 3000”, a strip I love!  But then you have the villains that range from the normal to the strange and the completely off-the-wall!


If anyone doubts Simon & Kirby as a team they need to buy this.  If they ever doubted the work of Kirby then buy this.  No wonder he could never be bothered with the mundane every day things in life; Kirby’s mind was so far out there that I sit sometimes and wonder just what he might have come up with were he still around!


As a birthday or Christmas present for a comic fan you know this is spot on.  Unless you read it first and decide to keep it!


Brilliant stories, brilliant art and wonderful colour.  A book to treasure and read whenever you need inspiration or a smile.

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