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Essential Captain America

Essential Captain America

List Price: $14.95
Your Price: $14.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Looks cool, but it's disappointing
Review: I snatched this one up when it first came out, since I had read reprints of some of this material in other places and wanted to see more of it. Unfortunately, the parts I'd read earlier (approx. the first 150 pages of this book) are about as good as it gets.

The list of comics creators who worked on this series is impressive -- including Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, and Stan Lee -- but ultimately it seems like they were just meeting deadlines and paying bills. The Kirby stories are the best; some of the others were completely unreadable for me. I'm hoping the second volume of CAPTAIN AMERICA reprints contains better work.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Looks cool, but it's disappointing
Review: I snatched this one up when it first came out, since I had read reprints of some of this material in other places and wanted to see more of it. Unfortunately, the parts I'd read earlier (approx. the first 150 pages of this book) are about as good as it gets.

The list of comics creators who worked on this series is impressive -- including Jack Kirby, Gil Kane, and Stan Lee -- but ultimately it seems like they were just meeting deadlines and paying bills. The Kirby stories are the best; some of the others were completely unreadable for me. I'm hoping the second volume of CAPTAIN AMERICA reprints contains better work.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Captain America is Great For Kids
Review: I thought this book had some of the best Captain America comics ever! They had great stories of good vs. evil, with patriotic Cap in the lead, and fantastic artwork by the late great, Jack "The King" Kiby. The Red Skull is a featured bad guy quite a bit, and he makes for excellent opposition against Cap. Finally, I like the length of each individual comic in the book. 20 pages is too long, and I like the 12-page format used in all but 3 of the Cap comics. Buy and enjoy the Essential Captain America Volume 1, then buy Volume 2.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: THE SILVER AGE OF CAPTAIN AMERICA
Review: is there some legal reason why Marvel doesn't put out collections of their Golden Age Heroes like Captain America, the Human Torch, etc? Just curious. I'd love to see those. Well this Essential volume collects Caps Earliest Silver Age Adventures from Tales of Suspense #55 - 99 and Captain America 100 - 102 once the title was changed.

While we were now in the mid-1960's, many of these stories were still fought against Nazi enemies like the Red Skull, Baron Zemo, and the Sleepers. The stories are all Stan Lee. Jack Kirby does the art on the early issues but later we have art by George Tuska (ugghhh) and John Romita (yay!).

Tales of Suspense 78 introduced Nick Fury as a pal of Cap's. #'s 82 - 84 introduced the android menace of the Super Adaptoid who could mimick the powers and abilities of any hero. # 93 and 94 featured the first appearance of the AIM created cyborg called MODOK. Truly one of the more bizarre villians of the 1960's. Leading into the title Change to Captain America issues 101 & 102 again feature the Red Skull and his evil Sleeper Robots.

One may say this collection is a bit too heavy with the Red Skull as he appears in 16 of the stories. I'd say that's true but what are you going to do? That was Cap's arch-nemesis at the time. If you're going to reprint the stories chronologically, you have to take the good with the bad. Not that it's bad, but one wishes that Jack and Stan had been perhaps a bit more creative with one of their oldest characters.

Nothing in the Essential Captain America is ground-breaking. It's good silver age fun though.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: kirby and kane
Review: like most adolescents i grew up on comics and like most i left them upon my latter high school years.
i dont follow up on the comic industry but have memories of my two favorite comic artists; jack kirby and gil kane and a half dozen characters, one of which is capt. america.
sadly both kirby and kane are gone now and i have no idea what turns the characterization of cap has taken.
but, i purchased this at a used bookstore and recalled why i loved these two artists so much in the first place.
i prefer later kirby.
as he got older his style became more and more pronounced and one never mistakes kirby for anyone else.
in particular, his women were a class apart and from what i've read all of his women were based on his beloved wife.
his work had an almost cubist abstraction to it and what he did in his art was inimitable.
kane, on the other hand, was more elegiac in his rendering and he too had an instantly recognizable style. kirby seemed to draw his pop art sensabilities from the likes of fine artists such as picasso while kane seemd to draw from klimt and el greco.
looking again at cap,and his politcs and morales are pretty liberal, even by todays standards.
and that, is surprisingly refreshing.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: WHAT A DEAL!
Review: okay--I have a few of these original issues and a lot of the reprints but even the reprints are 25 years old. See the silver age Captain America be developed before your eyes in some of lee and Kirby's best work. minor note: some stories are dated.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A nice way to complete a collection
Review: So there's no way I'm ever going to buy these as actual comics. Wanting to complete my collection, the "Essential" series is a nice way to read up on stories that were published before I was collecting. (Indeed, in this case, before I was born.)

This is cheaply printed and bound, (Mind you this is not necessarily a criticism) the B&W art starts to hurt your eyes after a few pages. Some of these stories are so badly dated that they're barely worth reading anymore.

If you're a fan, you need this, but don't expect any of it to surpass the mediocre.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: A nice way to complete a collection
Review: So there's no way I'm ever going to buy these as actual comics. Wanting to complete my collection, the "Essential" series is a nice way to read up on stories that were published before I was collecting. (Indeed, in this case, before I was born.)

This is cheaply printed and bound, (Mind you this is not necessarily a criticism) the B&W art starts to hurt your eyes after a few pages. Some of these stories are so badly dated that they're barely worth reading anymore.

If you're a fan, you need this, but don't expect any of it to surpass the mediocre.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A great selection of Captain America stories!
Review: So, do you want to see the Silver Age Captain America, that all-American, red-white-and-blue defender of justice? If so, then this book is for you! This book is a black-and-white reproduction of the Captain America stories from the comic books Tales of Suspense #59-99 and Captain America #100-102 (1964-68). As an added bonus, the final story of this book is a Golden Age blast from the past, Captain America and the Terror That Was Devil's Island, from Captain America #10, which pits Cap and Bucky against an evil Vichy-appointed warden of Devil's Island (1941!).

This is a great selection of Captain America stories! In this book you see Cap, Bucky, the Avengers, Nick Fury and others take on a host of bad-guys including the Nazis, the Viet Cong, Batroc the Leaper, Baron Zemo, and (of course) the infamous Red Skull. The action is great, and the stories are riveting!

Now, this book is just shy of being excellent, as these beautiful comics have all been reproduced in black-and-while. But, that said, it is a great book for anyone who loves Captain America, and the price is very reasonable. My son (now a Captain America fan!) and I both highly recommend this book to you.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Captain America is Great For Kids
Review: Some of the best artists in the history of comics: Jack Kirby,Jim Steranko, Gene Colan,and others; are represented here with some of their finest work. Some of the issues reprinted sell for a higher price for that very reason. Stan Lee wrote all the stories(1968-1970)sticking with this title after he reliquished others he had created; his dramatic portayal demonstrates the genuine affection he had for the character. In this volume, he also creates the Falcon, who was the second black super-hero, the first African-American super-hero, and still one of the best super-heroes.


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