The stories here were selected both for their significance and for their quality. Many get high marks in both categories but of course most fall short in one or the other. The book leads off with a vintage Robert Crumb effort called "My Encounter -- With Dracula!" from 1958 which is a harbinger of the strips to come. This one sends up the classic Stoker tale with aplomb.
The Bestest League in America is here mostly because Roy Thomas wrote and drew it for the debut issue of Alter Ego. It's not a fantastic bit of draftsmanship, but it does a sturdy job of sending up the DC superteam. It's followed by a somber piece called "Super Human" by Roger Brand which is a mildly clumsy but still effective tale of a man coming to grips with his changed status.
Two of the best offerings are "The Eclipse" by Ron Foss and "The Eye" by Biljo White. Foss might well be the most gifted artist in the collection, his take on the stylings of a young Joe Kubert tempered with some apt Carmine Infantino makes for a handsome comic book page. Foss had the chops to be a pro, but seems never to have wanted that enough at any point in his long association with comics fandom. The Eclipse is a variation on Dr. Mid-Nite and to my eye an improvement. Biljo White's The Eye is arguably the most successful of the fan characters (Dr. Weird comes to mind) and we get two stories here, his debut nad his actual origin. White has a lively entertaining style mindful of the Golden Age artists.
Landon Chesney is an artist singled out for special recognition and the story used to spotlight his work is "The Life Battery" written originally by Eando Binder and adapted by Chesney and writer Bill Spicer for comics. It's a story which calls to mind the classic EC stuff and you can read it here when it reprinted in the 70's in color. Also we get some other Chesney work such as his Shadow-like hero The Cloak and and even some heretofore unpublished roughs for a Cloak story.
Star-Studded Comics was the most successful of the fanzines that specialized in fan art stories and many of the stories here came from there. We get a whopper from its pages featuring many of the fanzine's greatest talent joining forces in a story which is like those classic Justice Society stories which featured a team but showed them working in duos to beat a sprawling world-beater of a threat. This time the team is dubbed the "Liberty Legion" and it's members are Mr. Weird, The Defender, Astral Man, Mercury, The Changling, and Powerman. All of these were established fanzine stars by the likes of Foss, White and the "Texas Trio". The trio was comprised of Larry Herndon, Buddy Saunders and another. "The Riddle of the Runaway Rocket" starring Powerman was written by Herndon and drawn by respected fan D. Bruce Berry.
Next we get Xal-Kor the Human Cat by Richard "Grass" Green, two stories actually. He get his origin which tells of another dimension where Cat-people battle Rat-people for control of civilization and a second which focuses on that war when it shifts to this Earth of ours. Green is one of the fan artists who went pro with some mild success.
Dr. Weird has been mentioned a few times now and we get one of his stories by creator Larry Herndon and up and coming fan artist Alan Weiss titled "The Curse of the Skullwing!". It's not my favorite Dr. Weird story who later would be written George R.R. Martin and drawn by Jim Starlin --quite a duo. He's a spin on the old ghostly Mr. Justice character.
"Ku! Primordial" was both written and drawn by Jeffrey Jones who was clearly just on the cusp of his distinctive artistic style. Anther offbeat story written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Dave Herring pops wise at Irwin Allen's Lost in Space and does it quite well. Herring also shows up with a nifty one-page effort called "Suicide" which is much funnier than it sounds.
"The End of Bukawai" is arguably the best crafted of all the stories in this collection. It adapts one of the Jungle Tales of Tarzan by ERB (at the point in time when some of these Burroughs stories were thought to have fallen into public domain ). Drawn by Harry Habblitz over Bill Spicer's breakdowns it's a work of such polish that it could easily have appeared in a professional comic without question.
C.C. Beck's "The Big Red Cheese" gets his due when a version of him dubbed "Goodguy" by Alan Hanley is added to this set. All the Marvels are present albeit under different names. "Introducing Altron-Boy" by Larry Ivie evokes the classic Mac Raboy Captain Marvel Jr. and was actually printed in Ivie's Monsters and Heroes which actually hit the stands.
George Metzger gets the fanzines into the psychedelic with an art style on "Master Tyme and Mobius Tripp" that evokes the Underground comics of the 70's. It was in fact the Underground publishing ventures that was partially to blame for fanzines giving way eventually. "Munch" is another such story, this time by Mark Wheatley and is from 1974 featuring a hero that looks a lot like Turok to me. "Betrayed" by Jerry Ordway is the latest work originally published in the era with a 1975 date and features a typical superhero tale.
Schelly includes a gallery of single pages to capture other work of the era such as early work by John Byrne, Jim Starlin, Bill Black and Wendy Pini among others. My favorite page in the whole collection is a beautiful lively page by Sam Grainger over a Roy Thomas script for a revised version of Charlton's Son of Vulcan. This was apparently submitted to Charlton but not picked up on. The collection closes with two new pieces (previously unpublished at least) - a story by Biljo White about another Shazam-like superhero called "Great Scott" and Schelly himself presents a story he'd written earlier called "The Immortal Corpse".
All in all a delightful anthology that offers a broad overview of what was available and giving the reader some dandy delights and even a few thrills. It's so good there is a second volume and that's for next time.
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