With the upcoming release of a Scream & Misty Special for Halloween I thought I'd pick up a copy of this one-off release from the publishers of 2000AD back in the early nineties which featured a whole range of old British comic book characters from long gone comics.
Starting with The Steel Claw from Valiant in the sixties our invisible anti-hero takes on the role of government assassin in this short story. Not bad. This is followed by the spooky Cursitor Doom from the pages of the post Power Comics SMASH! when it was turned into a more traditional "boys paper". The tale The Man Who Died Every Day showed a potential for this short lived feature which only lasted around six months despite excellent artwork by Eric Bradbury.
Up next was another refugee from Valiant in the form of Kelly's Eye who along with Robot Archie did actually appear in 2000AD, albeit the latters was very brief in Zenith.
The best story by far was the re-imagining of The Spider who turns into a British version of The Joker in this violent little tale in which the villain escapes prison. Watch out for the sequence amongst the down & outs where a certain retired soldier weaves wild tales to a young boy with a snake and a superhero has stitched his costume to his body to prevent his secret identity being exposed.
Finishing off is a tale of the crusading Doctor Sin in The Strange Case of the Wyndham Demon which is very British and takes the proverbial out of the Mary Whitehouse brigade.
The only story not up to scratch in this compendium was the oddly Kirbyesque Mytek The Mighty but then I was never a particular fan of that one.....
Sadly the copyright to most if not all these characters is held by DC/Warner Brothers so these probably won't see the light of day for a while.
However Rebellion has plenty of other goodies from the wonderful world of British comics to re-release and re-imagine.
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