By James Robinson and Others
Despite being the Avengers' most frequent and prominent female member for decades, this was the first ongoing series starring Wanda Maximoff. Works better as an anthology series about Wanda travelling around the globe and solving various magical problems, with a different artist for each issue. The only regular artist was really David Aja providing all those gorgeous covers. The loose arc about magic being broken never really comes together. Robinson also does his best to try and make sense of the dumb retcon about Wanda and Pietro's parentage, but since everyone at Marvel just ignores that these days it means that the mystery he tries to set up about their real father will likely never be resolved.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
By Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse and Others
Tom Strong was born out of the collapse of Awesome Comics and the subsequent cancellation of Moore and Sprouse's run on Supreme. Moore quickly took up Jim Lee's offer to launch his own line of comics at Wildstorm, which became known as America's Best Comics. Moore would come to regret this when Lee then sold his company to DC, who Moore had vowed never to work with again. He was tempted to scrap the whole venture, but stuck with it as it provided his artistic collaborators with much needed work. Tom Strong was one of the first titles launched and is a loving tribute and pastiche of classic pulp heroes like Doc Savage and takes place in a world where those types of heroes became the norm instead of guys in capes with superpowers. Moore had grown tired with dark deconstructionist comics at this point in his career and just wanted to tell some fun and outlandish adventure stories. With its central family of scientific adventurers, this is really the closest we'll ever get to seeing Alan Moore's Fantastic Four.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers
One of the great misconceptions in comics is that Frank Miller saved Batman from being campy with the release of The Dark Knight Returns in the late 80s. Nothing could be further from the truth. Batman comics hadn't been campy since at least 1969, and many of the best stories were released in the decade before TDKR, including Englehart and Rogers' memorable run on Detective Comics. While their collaboration was short, lasting only six issues, it produced some of the greatest Batman stories, including the classic 'The Laughing Fish' two-parter. The only major weakness is the ongoing romance subplot with Silver St. Cloud, which moves so quickly it never convinces as the epic love story the writer really wants it to be.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Chris Claremont and Walt Simonson
Universes collide when the Source Wall is breached, forcing the X-Men to team up with the New Teen Titans to battle Darkseid and a resurrected Dark Phoenix. This brought together Marvel and DC's biggest selling titles at the time. Although it was intended as a joint project, production was primarily handled by Marvel, which meant this is very much an X-Men story that just so happens to feature the New Teen Titans. It's fairly obvious throughout that Claremont is more interested in his own characters than the ones he's been loaned by the distinguished competition. This might've been balanced out by the planned follow up produced by The New Teen Titans team of Marv Wolfman and George Pérez, but conflict between editors at the two companies ultimately scuttled the project. The actual story is fine, but nothing memorable with Simonson's art really doing most of the heavy lifting.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
By John Byrne, Marv Wolfman, and Others
I'm always cautious approaching anything from John Byrne, especially when he's also writer. As an artist he is one of the best, although like Atari and Billy Idol he certainly peaked in the 80s, but as a writer he can be incredibly uneven (and don't get me started on what he's like as a person). This omnibus collects together his early work on the title as artist and the first half of his long run as writer/artist. This is generally considered one of the best FF runs by fans as well as a major return to form for the title after the exit of Jack Kirby a decade earlier. There's certainly some great stories here along with some terrific art, but Byrne's character work is often basic and flat. I never got the sense that he was really interested in Marvel's first family as people, just as instruments to play out his plots. There were some typically cringy Byrne lines and moments, but not as many as I feared there would be.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
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