Kona Monarch of Monster Isle by Sam GlanzmanMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Kona: The Monarch of Monster Isle collects Kona #1-4 and the unrelated Reptilicus #1.
As usual, comics twitter sent me down a rabbit hole, this time featuring lost world books and Sam Glanzman art. I nabbed this on Instocktrades for fairly cheap.
The main feature, Kona, was a Dell book from 1962. The Sam Glanzman art is fantastic. The story, not so much at times. The setup is good, though. Dr. Dodd, his widowed daughter, and her two kids end up on an island in the Pacific, go down a tunnel, and find themselves on Monster Isle, and soon met Kona, a friendly Neanderthal warrior.
Things get unnecessarily complicated after that with mutations and Monster Isle flooding, both with water from the Pacific Ocean and the creatures therein. Things pick up when Kona, the Dodds, and the Ape-Men head back to the surface, although the phrase "radioactive wolf pack" comes into play. The book ends on a cliffhanger, making me wish I'd gotten the second volume when I grabbed this one.
The bonus story, Reptilicus, is about a piece of frozen flesh found on a dig in Lappland that eventually becomes a winged reptilian horror. Reptilicus #2 is also in the next volume.
The Sam Glanzman art is easily the best thing about this book. He draws the fuck out of everything, specifically cavemen and dinosaurs. The stories are on the hokey side of typical Silver Age comics, complete with spurious science and leaps in logic. I still enjoyed them for the most part, though. Three out of five stars.
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