Mike Vosburg

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Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters collects all of the original 1970s appearances of the monster hunter Ulysses Bloodstone, plus a few one-shots featuring his daughter Elsa, and a four-part miniseries, Legion of Monsters. It does not collect, despite what the solicitation indicated, the 2001-02 miniseries that introduced Elsa and indeed, remains inexplicably uncollected. The stories are put in a somewhat weird order here (though I can see the logic), but I will go through them in publication order.

The earliest issues are nine featuring Ulysses Bloodstone. Ulysses made his debut in Marvel Presents #1, appeared again in the second issue of that title, and then transferred over to the black-and-white series Rampaging Hulk, appearing in seven of its first eight issues. Ulysses an immortal; ten thousand years ago, he was present when the magical bloodstone was shattered, and a bit of it was embedded in his chest, granting him immortal life. He's spent his time tracking down other fragments, stopping those who misuse them—especially rampaging kaijuesque giant monsters. There's a core of a good idea here, but I didn't find it to be terribly well executed. The first two issues, in particular, a very choppy; writer John Warner clearly thought he was setting up a long epic when he wrote Marvel Presents #1, and then issue #2 has to hastily wrap up and explain everything, and completely ignores some key aspects of issue #1 in the process!

His six issues of Rampaging Hulk are fine; mostly the high point is the beautiful black-and-white artwork. I did like Bloodstone's supporting cast, a lackadaisical actor turned assistant monster hunter and a crusading journalist, but the actual stories focused too much on the tedious machinations of a globe-spanning conspiracy, and never seemed to really go anywhere. Bloodstone was always on the backfoot, bizarre twists were being piled on top of bizarre twists, new complications being introduced at random. And again, it all gets abruptly cut short, this time in a one-issue conclusion by writer Stever Gerber that somewhat tastelessly discards the characters you've spent six issues getting to know. So what was the point?

That was (spoiler) the end of Ulysses Bloodstone, and as far as I know, he's stayed dead. I did pause reading the collection at this point to read the 2001-02 miniseries, but that's outside the scope of this review. The short version, though, is that Ulysses's somewhat overcomplicated backstory was played down; no more mention of the bloodstone fragments or the conspiracy, he just became a flamboyant hunter of monsters of all sorts and his mantle passed on to his daughter, Elsa. The omission of this miniseries from this collection is, frankly, obnoxious and inexplicable. Elsa was then reinvented with a somewhat different backstory in the miniseries Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., which I haven't read yet but will next. I can see why this isn't here (it's twelve issues long and not all about Elsa) but the retooling of a retooling is a jarring thing to happen between stories.

It's this retooled Elsa who is the focal character of three short comics from 2009-10, reprinted from Marvel Assistant-Sized Spectacular #2, Astonishing Tales: Boom-Boom and Elsa #1, and Girl Comics #2. The first is kind of meh, but the other two are fun stories about her overdramatic, overviolent life and her friendship with Tabitha "Boom-Boom" Sparks. You can never go wrong with some Faith Erin Hicks.

Lastly, there's Legion of Monsters (2011-12), a miniseries where Elsa has to work with some monsters, helping defend an enclave of ostensibly peaceful monsters from an attack via plague. The art is nice to look at, dark and moody, and I certainly appreciate any superhero comic that attempts to do something different, but I found both art and writing difficult to follow and ultimately got a bit lost in the contortions of it all; I think the story assumes a deeper familiarity with Marvel's bench of monster characters than I actually possess.

So overall, it's not the best Bloodstone collection that could have been published. If I hadn't read the 2001-02 miniseries in the middle, I don't think it would have been coherent at all; as it is, it seems to be about two characters related in nothing other than their name and the vague concept of monster hunting.

Elsa Bloodstone: Next in sequence »… (mais)

Another "phone book" collection of the Conan stories from Marvel Comics' b&w magazine The Savage Sword of Conan (#49-60 [Feb. 1980 - Jan. 1981]), published by Dark Horse, the current license holder of Robert E. Howard's (the creator of Conan) intellectual properties, this is a decent, if not outstanding, example of Marvel's work, since no REH stories are adapted here, and since writer Roy Thomas was nearing the end of his first association with Marvel and was starting to run out of gas even here; while Thomas' influence on Marvel's superhero characters was seminal (he wrote Marvel's first multi-part cosmic epic, "The Kree-Skrull War" in the pages of Avengers, and was the prime mover in starting most of Marvel's horror characters in the early 1970s, such as Werewolf By Night, Ghost Rider, Morbius the Living Vampire, Man-Thing, Satana, and Tigra), his best work for Marvel, IMHO, was on Conan, the premiere adventurer of REH's fictional Hyborian Age, set roughly 40,000 to 10,000 years ago, millennia after the sinking of Atlantis (which was the birthplace of another of Howard's fictional adventurers-cum-usurpers, Kull).

The stories & novels adapted here are L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's Conan the Liberator, which recounts how Conan became king of Aquilonia; Andrew J. Offutt's novels of a young Conan, Conan and the Sorcerer and The Sword of Skelos (though it's called Conan and the Sword of Skelos on the title pages of the three chapters; in this adaptation, Conan is drawn with a nod to Barry Smith's work on early issues of Marvel's color comic, Conan the Barbarian: horned helmet and necklace of three large discs and all); and the de Camp and Carter stories "The City of Skulls" and "The Ivory Goddess," the latter of which is a sequel to the REH story "Jewels of Gwahlur," recently adapted by P. Craig Russell for Dark Horse Comics.

The best Conan story here is the four-part adaptation of Conan the Liberator, which is a tale of Conan's late-middle, or early-late, career (and also features the sequence with the pint-sized satyrs, which another reviewer objected to here; they weren't too onerous to me, but to each his own); he's almost as wise and educated as he'll get as ruler of Aquilonia (as in the stories published in Marvel's double-sized King Conan title, later slimmed down and retitled Conan the King); and there's a poignant moment at the story's conclusion where Conan forgoes his usual round of carousing and wenching after a hard-fought victory to knuckle down to the more unglamorous (though more necessary) aspects of kingship, such as going over Aquilonia's accounts. The two Andrew J. Offutt novels book-end each other (they constitute the first and third books, respectively, of a trilogy; the second book is Conan the Mercenary, published in 1980); I'd have to give the nod to the three-part adaptation of Conan and the Sorcerer as being the better of the two stories here. Both the adaptations of Offutt's books benefit from pairing Conan against a strong female foil, a thief from the city-state of Zamboula named Isparana, who is about a decade older than Conan. Of the two short stories adapted here, "The Ivory Goddess" is slightly better than "The City of Skulls."

It's interesting to contrast Conan's characterization between the Conan the Liberator and the Offutt arcs; while Marvel's Conan was never shown as physically inept, undeveloped, or unskilled (although he does sneer at archery as a young man in his late teens in Offutt's take on him; this was a skill he would eventually pick up when he was serving in King Yildiz of Turan's army), he certainly wasn't always clever, or even particularly observant of anything that wasn't immediately connected with food, booze, fighting, loot, or, uh, "gettin' friendly;" in a fair bit of the stories in the early issues of Marvel's color Conan the Barbarian comic, Conan comes off as something of a himbo. He's far more superstitious in the Offutt arcs than he is in the Liberator arc, but he's also showing the beginnings of the wiliness and mental quickness that would eventually take him even farther than his preternatural physical strengths and skills would. That's why it's so interesting to read Thomas' take on him: he's one of the few characters Marvel had in the 1970s and early 1980s that actually had a believable mental development. (Shang-Chi, "The Master of Kung Fu," was arguably another exception, but Marvel's since dumbed him down and thrown him back into tackling various secret societies, and the occasional supervillain.)

The art here is never less than serviceable; John Buscema is the Conan artist par excellence (and, indeed, Buscema preferred drawing fantasy stories to superhero stories, although he excelled at both), and it's telling that his touches of "good girl" art (one of the pleasures for an adolescent boy to be found in the pages of The Savage Sword of Conan was the amount of line illustrations of beautiful women in various states of undress; bare breasts and bare bottoms were not uncommon sights in later issues of Savage Sword, possibly due to Marvel's attempt to compete with Warren's Vampirella b&w magazines) here exceed those of Mike Vosburg, a noted modern exponent of the genre, who illustrated, along with inker Alfredo Alcala, "The City of Skulls."

This collection also contains a short (12 pages) fix-up story called "Mirror of the Manticore," plotted by REH expert Fred Blosser and written by Roy Thomas and illustrated by Kerry Gammill, featuring the villain Olgerd Vladislav, last seen in the REH story "A Witch Shall Be Born" (adapted in TSSoC #5, collected in the first volume of Dark Horse's "phone book" reprints of same): it's an attempt to resolve the inconsistencies between Marvel's original story "The Sleeper Beneath the Sands" (which originally appeared in TSSoC #6) and the de Camp and Carter sequel to "Witch," "The Flame Knife," which Marvel did not have the license to adapt at that time. (Marvel's adaptation of "The Flame Knife" appeared in TSSoC #31 & #32, and is reprinted in the third volume of Dark Horse's Savage Sword "phone books".) This story isn't a disgrace, but it's the least of the tales reprinted here.… (mais)