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Dark Horse Heroes Omnibus Volume 1
Posted 15 Feb 2008
Publisher: Dark Horse
4.00 out of 5 Stars
Reviewed by Tim Janson
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One of the things that made Dark Horse a success when they started
publishing over twenty years ago is that they were smart enough to not
try to go head-to-head with Marvel and DC by putting out superhero
titles. Comics history is littered with long defunct companies that
tried that strategy. Dark Horse did their own thing, particularly in
the area of licensed properties like Predator, Aliens, and Star Wars.
But… Dark Horse did try their hand at superheroes in a limited
run with their “Comics’ Greatest World” imprint in
the early 1990s.
The line consisted initially of a sixteen issue maxiseries, with
each issue coming out weekly and spotlighting a different character in
a shared universe. There were essentially four cities or environments
to the line with each corner having four titles. The four
environments were Arcadia, Golden City, Steel Harbor, and The Vortex.
“… They managed to put together
a coherent and enjoyable series that managed to tie up everything by
the final issue.”
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A prologue reveals that an alien spacecraft came to Earth in the
1930s and settled underneath the Nevada desert where a being called
“The Enemy” or “The Heretic” began performing
experiments. Once such experiment would go awry, causing the alien
scientist to be sucked into a vortex. The resulting energies from the
vortex conveyed super powers to some people and horrible mutatations
to others.
The core plot to the initial maxiseries was that a race of aliens
had arrived on Earth searching for the Heretic and encountering
similar energy signatures in the various heroes of Earth. The heroes
battle the aliens but also the super-powered villains created by the
Vortex.
Some of the heroes of Comics’ Greatest World were quite
unique, such as mysterious vigilante “X”, the spirit known
as “Ghost”, and the bounty hunter, “Barb
Wire”. And please, don’t judge the character by the
perfectly awful film starring Pam Anderson. For every well-done hero
there were others that were quite bad. “Rebel” looked
like Booster Gold with a mullet, and Titan was basically a
Superman/Captain Marvel clone.
Some of the individual titles didn’t work because the
characters were just not very strong. Others such as X,
Barb Wire, and Ghost managed to outlive the couple of
other series and have their own titles for a time. With a different
writer handling each quadrant of titles, they managed to put together
a coherent and enjoyable series that managed to tie up everything by
the final issue. The series featured numerous artists including Adam
Hughes, Paul Gulacy, Vince Giarrano, Paul Chadwick, and Chris Warner.
Thus the art is quite diversified in its look but is uniformly
outstanding.
The second miniseries called Will To Power ran twelve
issues and isn’t quite as good as the first. Here, Titan has
turned from hero to villain, working as an agent for the National
Security Council. This series has him confronting and battling the
other heroes and is far more standard superhero fare than the original
series.
The Dark Horse Omnibus editions are similar to Marvel Essentials
except they cost a bit more ($25) but are in full color. And $25
bucks for nearly 500 pages in color is not a bad deal at all. I
hadn’t thought much about this line since originally reading
them some fifteen years ago. This was a fresh take on superheroes and
still holds up well today.
—CCdC—
Cover image used without explicit permission in accordance with the "Fair Use" provision of US copyright law.
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