I love how this is billed as The Complete Howard Chaykin Classic!.

Uh...no.

When I think of some of Chaykin's classic work, I think American Flagg or his work on The Shadow or Black Kiss. If you ask me, his best work was on a blink-and-you-missed-it single issue Monark Starsalker and his work on Dominic Fortune, both for Marvel.

In fact, this single issue collection of Ironwolf tales sort of seems like an embryonic version of Starstalker, which would come along about three-ish years later.

Chaykin came a long way in a short while, but this is actually somewhat painful to read. The art is before he came into his own style and looks a lot like Starlin (though not as clean) at this point. And while he can be blamed for the rough art and plotting, the blame falls squarely on Denny O'Neil for the horrifyingly overwritten purple prose. It's staggeringly awful.

For all of that though, as others have said, there are the first faint sprouts of ideas he would later build into much better written and drawn stories. It's sort of like finding a bit of early archaeology that would point to modern man.

UPDATE: I don't think I've ever had this happen previously, but I literally had no memory of reading this collection previously (which shows what little impact it had on me), nor did I even remember writing the review 2 1/2 years ago.

Bizarre.

But, yeah, I still stand by my original words. Though I'm surprised 2016-me gave this three stars. Two is all it deserves. Two different damsels in distress? One who's the leader of the resistance, but is Ironwolf's second-in-command? Come on! ( )