Star Hawks: The Complete Series

Rating:
Summary: A Fantastic reprint!
Review: I have been waiting for twenty-five years for this strip to be re-printed and Hermes Press has finally gotten it right. Ron Goulart, the strip's author writes a nice forward and there is a really comprehensive essay about the strip's artist, Gil Kane, as well. But seeing all the strips re-printed in one volume is fantastic. The strip is a classic and to have it so well reproduced with crisp printing is an added bonus. Hoorah, my dreams have been answered!

Rating:
Summary: Great strip, great book, great value
Review: Just picked this book up. Was a big fan of the strip and this book does it justice. The printing is clear and easy to read, there is lots of documentary material, in addition to the strip reprint itself, and finally I got to read the whole three and a half years. I remember my local paper stopped carrying it after only a year and I wanted to read more, now I've got it all. Also, this is a big book, one inch thick on heavy, nice paper. All in all, great production, and a great value. In closing, the foreword and introduction essay were nice too, well written, accompanied by lots of Gil Kane's original art to boot, impressive.

Rating:
Summary: A classic strip badly manhandled
Review: Ron Goulart and Gil Kane created the classic Star Hawks comic strip 25 years ago, and since its conclusion, the strip's stories have been reprinted several times--but the series as a whole has never been reprinted (earlier reprints always omitted some of the strips). So when word went out that a publisher was going to reprint the entire strip, from start to finish, it sounded too good to be true.

It is. The production values alone on this book are incredibly poor. Strips are warped and misprinted, artwork is frequently, badly and obnoxiously retouched, spelling and grammar errors abound in the text portions. There're nothing like excellent production standards--and this book has nothing like excellent production standards.

To see the story complete after so long (I read it when it first appeared, and still have my original clippings) is great; I'm just incredibly disappointed that complete amateurs were put in charge of _producing_ it. The best bet would be to wait until a revised (and much-cleaned up) reprint might come about; unfortunately, that seems highly unlikely.

If you can find any of the more recent strip reprint books, buy them instead. You'll get better production on newsprint than these folks turned in on slick, distractingly-glossy paper.

A disappointed Star Hawks fan

dj