JACK KIRBY’S STARR WARRIORS

$9.99, 36 pages, Image

This is exciting: A lost Jack Kirby cosmic masterpiece. Before he teamed up with Joe Simon, before they created Captain America—83 years ago in fact, there was Adam Starr and his Solar Legion, the first comic art The King signed with the name Jack Kirby. The world’s foremost Kirby scholar (and damn fine cartoonist as well) Tom Scioli has remixed those early tales into a glorious one-shot. You can check out Scioli’s Total Recall YouTube channel to see how he attacked the process, but it’s kinda like how Blade Runner got better when they dumped the narration or The Beatles Let It Be… Naked doesn’t need to fight with oppressive production—this remixed comic book has ditched the garish colors, cramped panels, and rushed inks of the 1940s to present the wonderful book that was there all along.

Collects: The Solar Legion stories from the early Crash Comics (1940)

SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE OGN

$19.99, 192 pages, Boom Studios

So it goes. If you missed the hardcover of this from 2020, and, well, most of missed that entire year, you’re in luck—now there’s a trade paperback version and it’s a couple bucks cheaper. Ryan North and Albert Monteys are two of the smartest and most interesting cartoonists working right now and, somehow, they adapt this unadaptable masterpiece. Yes, you should read the novel, but this conversion into a graphic novel places this work in rarified air (along with Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s comic take on City Of Glass by Paul Auster)—it is essential onto itself.