I recently bought a copy of
Essential Luke Cage Vol 1, mainly because I had a great article about Luke Cage's debut submitted for the
GhettoManga Quarterly Luke Cage tribute issue, and I needed some scans to go with it. Not being familiar with those early Cage stories, I was surprised how good a read the book is...
I posted this sequence because the issue it comes from is a real high-water mark for the character, in a book full of what I consider great story. Not just the fact that he runs up on arguably Marvel's greatest villain, Doctor Doom, but he shows a similar lack of awe for the Fantastic Four. While respecting Reed Richard's intelligence, he talks Marvel's premier super team into lending him a super-sonic jet so he can journey to Latveria and get the $200 that Doom (his former client) owed him for services rendered.
After assisting an alien-led robot uprising and beating Doom to a standstill,
Luke manages to get the biggest tightwad on Earth to come up off the Benjamins so he can get back to the business of not getting assassinated and/or deposed by a mass of angry robots*. Then to add insult to injury, when he returns the Fantastic Four's plane, he refuses to discuss his personal business with them, and heads to the crib to clean up, giving Ben Grimm the cold shoulder when he wants details on the robot coup.
Good stuff, for sure... anyways, like I said, there will be tons of great analysis of Cage in
the new issue, which will be done soon. until then, if you see a copy of
Essential Luke Cage Vol 1
in your comic shop, I suggest you cop it! It's great to see the old-school artwork and dense writing, not only from household names like Roy Thomas, Archie Goodwin and John Romita, but also lots of great work by cats I wasn't at all familiar with. Since there probably won't be room for my review of this book in
the tribute issue, I may post a few more nuggets of it here.
holla!
-samax.
*yeah, that got the robophobic tag added to the post. If Doom can't hold the machines down, who CAN?
