500 Great Comic Book Action Heroes

Rating:
Summary: Covers a lot of Material - but gets many small facts wrong.
Review: This book covers a lot (and I mean a lot) of material. As a nice, quick overview of Comic Book heroes and their history, as told from a loving and friendly point of view, this is fairly good. There were characters in here I did not know about, or had forgotten about (and I'm a lifelong comic fan).

However, Mike Conroy could have used some fact checking. With the sheer amount of detail, I suppose we can forgive a few small errors, but here are a couple of details I found to be more than incidental:

On page 149, he refers to the character Starseed as "malevolent." In fact, the opposite was true. Starseed did drop a mountain in the middle of Sunset Blvd. - but he was merely returning it from when he took it ages ago. He was actually benevolent, and offered to cure Morbius, Man-Thing, Ghost Rider and Werewolf by Night of their afflictions. Unable to control their monstrous selves, the monsters killed Starseed rather than accept his gift. The tale was a tragedy, with Starseed as the hero that dies in the end. Next time, read more closely, Mr. Conroy.

On page 141 he refers to the character of Blade, the Vampire Slayer as "African-American." I find it hard for a man who was born and raised in England to be an American, but maybe his citizenship changed later in life (although all Blade's early adventures take place in or near London, where he was living with his girlfriend Safron).

If these two small errors don't bother you (they actually don't bother me all that much), then the other errors likely won't bug you either.

A good, solid book of capsule histories and an accessible, quick reference work.