Indiana Jones Omnibus Volume 2
Indiana Jones Omnibus Volume 2
By Various
Dark Horse
Harrison Ford might be knocking on a bit but the beauty of the comics medium means that your lead characters can look eternally young if you want them to be.
This Dark Horse collection is able to collect a grab bag of assorted adventures that see our archaeological hero go gallivanting around the world in search of Jason's Golden Fleece, Christ's Spear of Destiny, a Viking map leading to Vinland and the Philosopher's Stone.
He kisses his leading ladies and outmanoeuvres Nazis and every other bad guy who rears his crooked little head at every twist and turn, with a wise crack on hand and a whip in his hand.
With a troop of more than capable draughtsmen like , Leo Duranona, Gary Gianni, Ken Hooper, Dan Spiegel and Eduardo Barreto you know the art department's well catered for.
Writers include Lee Marrs and Elaine Lee but not simply to show Dark Horse aren't sexually exclusive because those ladies have proven talent, although my favourite story is the cleverly written Indiana Jones and the Golden Fleece story by Pat McGreal and Dave Rawson (who I've never heard of before, unless they're normally screenwriters).
The odd magical fantasy aspect in some of the stories feels out of place, and when such things enter the films they're only there for a few hokum moments. Indiana Jones is about cliff-hanger daring-do and on the whole this is a great collection of such romps.
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Paul Birch - The latest word on comics in the Midlands
Thanks for the compliments!
We've labored mostly in the fertile fields of the Danish giant Egmont whose distribution channel is so wide and deep that AOL-Time-Warner uses it when they wish to step outside the parochial confines of the United States.
A story published through Egmont can reach near 20 million readers in a given week. But it's slightly out-of-the ordinary and boring to explain to anyone who is uninterested. To perhaps pique your interest, I'll tell you that after many, many years I was finally able to read a story of mine in English -- because it was published in India.
One thing we did in the U.S. of which we are both quite proud is CHIAROSCURO, finally collected by Vertigo into a trade paperback.
We had great fun (on many levels) with the Indiana Jones story. Not to toot our own horn, but if you thought Indy clever, it's quite possible you'll greatly enjoy CHIAROSCURO, too.
And thanks again for the kind words. They are hard to come by and mean a lot.
Sorry. Didn't mean to post anonymously. I was thrown out of your comment section. Luckily I still had a copy of most of the post in page memory, but lost all my careful formatting.
To Dave Rawson,
Thanks for your update... No need to explain to us Brits that there's a whole wide world of comics out there, and that Europe produces many of the greatest... After all, we Brits are nominally part of Europe!
As for your considering your story boring, I personally would be hearing more.
Regards, Paul H Birch.
The following is from what I've gleaned, with the caveat that I'm no expert on the subject:
As I understand it, Egmont is one among other publication houses who hold the rights to publish Disney stories. They pool their creations and in return can extract others' creations from the pool. This works much like in the States where a PBS radio or TV station may create programming which may then be selected for broadcast by other affiliated PBS stations.
In this way, a story I wrote for Egmont might be picked up by the publisher with rights in India who will publish the story there. Each publisher works with translators to prepare their scripts for illustration, care given to make sure the word balloons are large enough to accommodate the most verbose language.
When another publisher contracts to re-publish the story in their publication, they obtain the artwork and their translators re-translate the story for the local audience.
Hi Dave,
Egmont indeed own Disney comic rights in Europe - They entered into the British market some 20 years back to regain that license from Robert Maxwell (who had bought up London Editions & Fleetway)but ironically have published few UK Disney comics since.
Whereas, in Europe yes you can ideed see countless Donald and Mickey comics sitting next to each other in all shapes and sizes and often in different languages together.
Thanks for your own insight into the work you do.
Best, Paul.