The Saga Of Solomon Kane!

I wrapped up the Dark Horse B&W reprint of Solomon Kane's adventures from Savage Sword of Conan and elsewhere. Aside from a few of these very early stories, I'd read none of this so it was all new-old Marvel for me.

The earliest Kane stories with artwork by Alan Weiss are superb. Weiss gave Kane a distinctive flavor, similar but not at all aping what Smith did with Conan. Kane's stories under Weiss's hand were lush and had a crisp modern feel to them, even today. There's another great story by Howie Chaykin. The storytelling is by Roy Thomas and Don Glut. In fact much to my surprise I learned here that Glut was the primary scribe for Kane's adventures, writing the majority of these stories.

The artwork in the later stuff is by journeymen. David Wenzel still many years from his Hobbit stuff is on board for several stories, but in nearly every case the storytelling seemed to suffer by insufficient page count. I'm not one who usually bickers about this kind of thing, but there was a distinct cramped quality to many of the middle stories, even those which got serialized. Following the action was hard at times, but perhaps that has to do with the reduction of the page for this format.

The latter part of the book reprints stuff from the 90's. At one point there's a jump from the mid-80's to the the 90's and the change in styles is remarkable. Many of the later stories are well told with some artwork that grew on me as I read the stories. There's even a crossover with Conan to close out the volume.

All in all I'd give this volume a B. It's a decent read, it adapts most of the key Kane stories, but the artwork is suspect at times. The high romance that should permeate a Kane story is often missing in these. The first few stories with Kane encountering Dracula are fantastic, and there's a sequel to this classic clash that I'd never read. All in all not that bad, it opens and closes very strongly.

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