Showcase Presents: Enemy Ace

The latest DC Showcase book came out this week. Lately, the Showcases have been more mainstream--lamer Superman Family and Batman material--rather than the idiosyncratic stuff they'd been slipping in earlier, like Elongated Man, Metamorpho, and House of Mystery. Enemy Ace makes up for the lull. 

The reason isn't the Kubert stories, which of course are great and make up about 350 pages of the book. Instead, the secret treasure is the last 150 or so pages, dating from the mid to late 70s, which offers other artists' takes on Robert Kanigher's von Hammer. Artists like John Severin, Russ Heath, Howard Chaykin, and Neal Adams. Severin is great as always. Chaykin doesn't come off very well in this reproduction. It's been interesting to me to see how art in more recent Showcases suffer from the lack of color more than the older stuff; I bet Chaykin's less detailed expressionistic art is great in its original colored form. 

Joe Kubert's Enemy Ace will always be in print or near to it. This obscure never seen the light of day material is why the Showcase series exists, as far as I'm concerned.