The Boy Commandos 1

I was familiar with the Silver Age of Comics (the 1960s), and I knew about the Golden Age of Comics, but I'd never read anything from the Golden Age. "The Boy Commandos" is an awesome surprise.The coloring is odd. I suspect that reflects the original coloring, but I have no idea. Regardless, the stories and the art are top drawer.

Reviews above have a spat which boils down to whether you prefer DC to reprint these volumes on high gloss paper or a non-gloss paper. Unless you like reading arcane internet squabbles, skip those reviews. Frankly, if you were reading these in the original format, they'd look a lot closer to these editions, which are on the flatter, non-gloss paper. Whichever, you still get Simon and Kirby's ridiculously elastic anatomy and facial structure, which are easily worth the price of admission no matter what kind of paper these are printed on. These stories are okay to read, but they're a hoot to look at; the drawing is vibrantly expressive. I always preferred this period of Kirby; Simon certainly added something to him. And vice versa; once they split up they were never as good as they were together.

I love Simon/Kirby stuff, this was good but not my favorite line of what they did.

Who cares about any flaws that may or may not pertain to this book? I mean, this is the Boy Commandos! And so at last poor slobs like me can once again read these terrific stories that we so enjoyed as kids but could not afford since then, until this long awaited reprint. Hooray for those who re-created this wonderful feature!!

I ordered this book with much trepidation. The previous three Jack Kirby (and/or) Joe Simon Golden Age reprints by DC have been far below sub-par. Yet I kept buying them in the faint hopes that someone, somewhere within the DC offices would see and read of the overall disappointment fans of golden age reprints like myself have felt and expressed on message boards and in reviews such as this one; of the disappointment bordering on disgust we have with the reprint quality of these books, with the scan quality of these books and with the restoration quality of these books. Ever since the Starman Archives, vol. 2, DC has greatly lowered its prior standard of excellence for lovingly restoring their golden age material. Now this may be due to budgetary reasons, as the main restoration man on the books I have seen thus far is Rick Keene, who has been with DC since the beginning. Whether it is his decision or a command from on high, the quality of DC's reprints of older material has been in decline for going on 2 years now.Apparently, the source material for these reprints has come from one Harry Mendryk. Now, I'm sure he is a nice man and loves golden age books as much as I do or any other collector. But he seems to take a measure of pride in providing DC with *scans* of the golden age material from the S&K Sandman, the S&K Newsboy Legion and the S&K Boy Commandos. I recognize that DC may have asked for scans, I don't know how they work with contractors, but to aid their massacring of their visual history is despicable in my view. I have scanned comics myself for personal preservation, and while I have no idea what they may look like mass-produced, I would at least take some effort in avoiding the rampant bleed-through, muddy colors, spot-color-restoration and other aesthetic issues that have been plaguing these volumes. From what I can see, the only true restoration is coming in the form of elimination of some bleed and whitening the word bubbles (it looks like the word bubbles were filled in with the "fill" tool of your average Photoshop or other image editing software). If that is all that is being done, it is perhaps the laziest form of restoration I can think of for a reprinted comic. Not only is it lazy to just do such spot restoring, but it makes the rest of the untouched comic page standout due to the *lack* of color brightening and restoring to pre-published condition of these early comics.Almost every page where the whitening technique was used makes the rest of the scene on that page look as if it is taking place in a darkened room or at dusk. The white jumps out at you, and it wouldn't be noticeable at all if the other colors were brought to the same luminescence as the white (granted, if all the colors were uniformly brightened using the aforementioned fill tool it would look amateur as all get out, but even that would be an improvement from the unbalanced nature of the books as they are.)In conclusion, The Boy Commandos by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as collected in this volume have been disrespected by the DC Comics' outsourced editing crew, and DC would be wise to either increase their budget and find original copies of future S&K books so they can do a proper restoration, or cut ties with Harry Mendryk as his (and DCs) methods are damning quality (and some mediocre) work by two legends of the industry to languish for what is likely to be years if not decades in collected tombs of shoddy worksmanship. I seriously can't understand how Mendryk, Keene, or anyone else can scan (much less photograph! That never works) these pages, look them over and feel confident that they look good. I understand the concern with losing some of the artwork through the old bleaching process, but at least there you get the work looking more like a book published in the present than a comic that's been sitting at the bottom of someone's basement pile for 40 years.It seems that the price to pay for non-reconstructed art is non-reconstructed color. And for comics that were originally in color, that's just not the way to go. Furthermore, there are so few copies of the originals in circulation that most people who would buy a collection like this one these days are unlikely to have an original paper copy of the comic on hand to compare and nitpick over what art was removed and what was kept in.Sigh. Don't buy this book.

Great book pulling together some great Kirby/Simon stories. At this price point, you can't miss. Kirby's 'boy adventures' are remnants of a long by-gone era. Any one interested in comic art, or studying this period, will find this of interest. They probably won't collect this work elsewhere for a long time.

Simon and Kirby were about to be drafted. They cranked out these stories at a breath taking pace. And yet the action is so palpable, the pace is frenetic, and it captures a nation zeitgeist at war perfectly. Only the first ten Captain America's come close to rivaling this, and you should have them too. Other people's quibbles about the quality of DC's reissue standards are all true, but the work itself has few equals in the entire history of comics.

Good stories, good art. It brought back memories.

BOOM, POW, BIFF.At one point this outsold Superman comics. Enjoyed by kids who Dad's had gone to war and the Dad's who wanted some light readying that they picked up at the PX while in the Milatary. Great war comics with a fun cast of characters! WOW!