Stripper's Guide

by Sheldon Stark and Jerry Robinson
Dark Horse Books, 2010
12 x 9.5 hardcover, 224 pages, $34.95
ISBN 978-1-59582-287-1, 978-1-59582-519-3


When I covered Jet Scott, a high-tech adventure strip of the 50s, as an Obscurity of the Day  I called Sheldon Stark's scripts for the feature "well-written though disappointingly conventional". On reading the first story in this two volume reprinting of the strip I thought I was going to have to eat my words. "The Banthrax Incident" ranks as one of the most asinine and badly written stories I've ever struggled through in comics or otherwise. I won't go into details, but the thought that this is the story that sold the syndicate on the series just blows my mind. Fear not, though, because Stark's writing improved greatly in subsequent stories.

Jet Scott is a troubleshooter for the Office of Scientifact who solves technology and science-based mysteries. The idea is a good one, though some of Stark's idea's about technology, especially computers, are real-knee-slappers. One of the cuter ones comes in that first story -- in order to find a professor who's gone missing Scott feeds his 'personality profile', his likes, dislikes, favorite foods and so on, into a computer. It promptly spits out the result that the misplaced prof is undoubtedly searching for the legendary Seven Cities of Cibola. Well of course! Even though that wasn't even fed in as an interest of his.We know it wasn't because Jet spends the next few strips trying to figure out what the heck Cibola is. Apparently he has a computer but not an encyclopedia.

Anyway, this sort of cockamamie stuff is pure fun, with the advantage of hindsight we can snicker at such things. It really only added to my enjoyment. Less appreciated by today's audience might be that Jet Scott romances a new girl in every story, often making some pretty big promises about the future, and then each babe is promptly forgotten when the next story begins. It's pure fantasy stuff though -- do we object to James Bond doing the same thing?

Jerry Robinson's slick art on the feature is shown to great advantage in the book. The dailies are all reproduced VERY large, bigger than they ever ran in papers. Sundays are decent-sized, too. The reproduction is generally excellent. The occasional daily obviously came from microfilm, but most seem to be either from proofs or good quality tearsheets. Restoration of the dailies is okay though my pet peeve about not fixing type lice and dropouts had me grumbling a bit -- not something you'd probably even notice if you don't do restoration work yourself. The Sundays are really impressive -- just enough restoration to bring them back to life, not so much as to make them garish. Very nice work.

If you're interested in the Jet Scott two-volume series, be aware that the publisher apparently ran out of stock almost immediately. A mere few months after the books were published I went to purchase my copies and found that I had no choice but to buy a damaged copy on the used market. What's up with that? Checking Amazon now, though, I see they are available once again, but who knows for how long -- order yours quickly would be my advice. 

Labels: Strip Teasers