Manhunter - The Completed Saga!

My personal manhunt is finally over. And as a little extra-special find for my birthday this year, I located a delightful copy of Manhunter - The Complete Saga from the small Excalibur publishing outfit. This was the very first reprinting of the amazing series by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson, and the only version of the Manhunter story I didn't already have.  And it's a much better package than I expected. There are great pencil drafts from Simonson when he was designing the character. And the late great Archie Goodwin supplies both a great foreword and afterword for the volume. And the short but sweet saga of Paul Kirk performs quite well in black and white. We are even treated to a full page of Goodwin's own distinctive cartooning. This was produced in 1979 by the Excalibur gang, not a time when upscale comic reprints were all that common. It was less than a decade since the original stories had appeared. 

Manhunter by Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson is among the most treasured comic yarns in my long experience in the form. As Goodwin describes in his introduction to the 1979 reprint, the freedom to create something fresh and unusually lively was a result of two factors. One was that the series appeared in Detective Comics, which at the time was suffering a sales slump and so change was seen as good. And the other was that Manhunter was the back-up piece and so seen instantly as less important overall. So, things could change, and in the Bronze Age changes in the status quo of comics was much ballyhooed but rarely done with total commitment. Here was a hero who could do things other Comics Code approved heroes might not be able to get away with, hidden as he was in the shadows of a dangerous world but also in the back of a familiar comic.

I have now collected the Manhunter in all its forms. I picked up several of the chapters in real time as they first appeared and have filled in the gaps since. I've picked up the 1984 DC reprint, the 1999 reprint titled Manhunter: The Special Edition which hard on the sad news of Archie Goodwin's untimely death offered a new chapter, wordless but no less important to the core saga. I more in more recent years picked up the story in a collection of Archie Goodwin's best DC stories, and I even popped for the magnificent "Artist's Edition" which showcases Simonson's tasty pages in their full black and white glory. I love this little saga. I loved it then and I love it still. I am not alone.

The story taps so many of the pop-culture vibes of the era, with a Golden Age hero named Paul Kirk who has grown disillusioned and then dies in a tragic accident. He is revived by a cabal of evil men who seek to use him and his genetic make-up to help them conquer the world. He turns against these men and turns his back on power and immortality to recapture that which they seem to have stolen from him, his fundamental sense of self and his basic human need to shape his own destiny as much as he can. 

The notion to connect Manhunter directly to the vintage Golden Age hero of that named made most famous by the Simon and Kirby team was brilliant. Ironically though the Goodwin-Simonson Manhunter has been reprinted numerous times, the Simon and Kirby Manhunter tales have never been collected though they'd fit neatly into a single slim tome. It's an oversight on DC's part for certain. We've gotten good reprints of the Boy Commandos, the Newsboy Legion, and Sandman, but for some unknown reason no similar package for Manhunter. 

I first noticed something different about the writing of Archie Goodwin in his early Iron Man issues back in the late 60's when fresh from Warren he dabbled a bit for Stan "The Man". There was a deceptive simplicity to his writing that though it felt like it had not personal style was in fact rich with and inviting for that very reason. When he took the editor's seat at Detective Comics, I took notice and could feel that a more adult approach was evident in both the lead feature and the back-up. 

And then there's Walt Simonson who made his bones on Manhunter, a quick little series that lasted only a brief time but brought many awards and critical recognition to its makers. Simonson did not waste the heft the series gave him and went on to become a significant force in comics of the era. Reading Manhunter in various formats is like listening to a great piece of music in different performances, the greatness is always evident regardless. 

If they sell Manhunter again, I likely will buy it all over -- the music is so very, very sweet. 

Below are the splash pages for the series and the covers of the Detective Comics issues in which they appeared. All but one of the Manhunter chapters was in a 100-Page comic and those were absolute troves of wonderful stories from across the decades. Maybe that richness added to my ardor for the series. I don't know. 

The inventiveness of Simonson's pages is remarkable and reminds me of Will Eisner's delightful Spirit splashes and he was just getting started. (The story "Cathedral Perilous, the fifth chapter was specifically inspired by Eisner's Spirit stories, according to Goodwin.) Three of the seven Manhunter stories won Shazam awards (Chapters 1, 5 and the finale) and garnered best writer awards for Goodwin in 1973 and 1974. This series is so good that it has withstood all of the reboots by DC over the intervening decades. A remarkable saga indeed. Goodwin and Simonson returned to the character in the late 90's but before Goodwin could script the final pages by Simonson he passed away. Simonson refused to have anyone else write the story and it was published without dialogue of any kind. The storytelling is so keen that none is needed. The collection which featured this final new Manhunter tale also won awards. 

Comics don't get better than Manhunter! Now if DC would only reprint those classic Golden Age Manhunter stories. I have the few in magazines here and there, but we need a collection. 

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