The Strange Death of Adam Warlock

I'm running rather behind on my blog postings so what was meant to a be a long post on why Rusalka at Glyndebourne is not as good as some newspapers have rated it is, instead, a shorter post on why Jim Starlin's Warlock is a masterpiece.

The initial perceptions of Warlock are rightly good, this is Cosmic Jim Starlin writing and drawing the stories of a cosmic hero, Adam Warlock.

It gets even better when we look at the cover which shows Adam Warlock going in to the future to kill himself to stop the future he has seen where he becomes the despot Magus.

It gets better still when we follow Adam Warlock after he has killed himself through to the future time when his previous self appears to kill him.

The dialogue between the two Warlocks, one of whom has been through the scene before, is just stunning.

The Dr Who episode Blink won lots of awards for doing this sort of stuff thirty years later.

There are lots of very very good people who have written and/or drawn comics over the years but there are very few who I would class as absolute masters of the genre. Jim Starlin is one of these.

The proof of the pudding may be in the eating here and I am delighted to have paid not a small sum of money for a signed collection of the Dreadstar stories.

Comics, like music, is a genre that I keep falling in and out of love with but whenever I see something by Jim Satrlin I remember just how good the media can be. Warlock is one of my very favourite comics of all time and has remained so for over thirty years. And long may this continue.

Jim Starlin continues a Jack Kirby legend

Anybody who has even a basic knowledge of recent comics history knows that the superhero era was started at Marvel comics by Stan Lee and Jack "King" Kirby.

Between them they brought us The Incredible Hulk, The Fantastic Four, The Uncanny X-Men, The Mighty Thor, and many other major characters.

Stan Lee stayed at Marvel but Jack Kirby moved to DC comics in the 1970s and invented a new set of characters including Kamandi (probably my favourite), OMAC, Sandman and the New Gods.

Now, some thirty years later, the New Gods have been brought back by one of my very favourite writer/artists, Jim Starlin, the genius behind Warlock, Captain Marvel, Dreadstar and so many other cosmic stories.

This is going to be good!

My (small) collections of signed books

The recent arrival of my signed copy of Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman started me thinking about how many signed books I have.

Until a few years ago the thought of getting a book signed had never occurred to me and then I started buying Redwall books for the boys and the Redwall website says, "all books purchased from the Redwall La Dita Book Club are autographed by Brian Jacques". As there was no extra cost for this, and I was buying the books online anyway, the books came signed as a matter of course. I have several of these.

Not long after that the younger son started reading the Measle books by Ian Ogilvy (alert readers will have spotted The Saint connection) and, again, I was able to buy a signed copy of one of them online at no extra cost.

The first signed book that I got for myself was Jim Starlin's Dreadstar. Jim Starlin has been a big favourite of mine since the Warlock series in the early seventies so this was a nice treat to myself.

I'm not sure what other signed books I have, a clue that perhaps signed books are not that special anymore, but one is worth mentioning and that is my signed and numbered limited edition print of Pearls of Peoria by Philip Jose Farmer, pictured here. 


Philip Jose Farmer is still my favourite author thanks, mainly, to the new worlds he invented and the fantastic stories he placed in them. The obvious examples are the Riverworld and World of Tiers series. Well worth a read, signed or unsigned.