Manhunter by Archie GoodwinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
After a hunting accident, the Council revived Paul Kirk and made him their assassin. But Manhunter has other ideas and the Council must be stopped!
I remembered Manhunter's entry in Who's Who back in the day. The Manhunter story is an award winner and I finally stumbled across a copy at a comic convention. The hunt is on!
Manhunter is almost the opposite of today's comic. Told in eight page morsels in the back of Detective Comics, Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson cram everything they can into every page. Instead of the typical six panel grid, Simonson goes for twelve to fifteen panels per page.
The backstory is told in flashbacks as Manhunter and Christine St. Clair find their way to The Council's headquarters. With a certain Dark Knight Detective in tow, Manhunter meets his makers and the story comes to an explosive climax.
This is an early Simonson effort but the magic is apparent already. In the foreword, Archie Goodwin said he and Simonson attacked the comic Marvel style, with Archie providing a slim plot to Simonson and filling in the dialogue once Simonson finished the art. The resulting product feels more like a Marvel book than a DC one.
The fact that Detective Comics was suffering from low sales at the time gave Goodwin and Simonson a lot of freedom. That, and the fact that Manhunter hadn't been seen in thirty years at that point and was a pretty obscure character to begin with, gave them a unique opportunity. To top it off, Archie got a job at Warren comics and DC let him finish off the series the way he wanted to. The stars were aligned just right when Manhunter was created.
Manhunter is an interesting piece of comics history and a sharp contrast to today's decompressed comics. 3.5 out of 5 stars.
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