J.M. DeMATTEIS: How THE LEGENDARY LYNX Inspired KRAVEN’s LAST HUNT
The Web of Spider-Man #32 Facsimile Edition — featuring Part 4 of the classic storyline — is out Nov. 13… By J.M. DeMATTEIS The 1970s were an extraordinary decade for the comic book business, a cornucopia of new voices, new genres, new styles. We had Thomas and Smith on Conan, Wein and Wrightson on Swamp Thing, O’Neil and Adams on Green Lantern/Green Arrow. Jack Kirby blew the lid off the industry with his groundbreaking Fourth World books for DC, while, over at Marvel, young iconoclasts like Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart, and Jim Starlin were deconstructing and reconstructing the superhero genre. Not enough for you? How about Moench and Gulacy turning the martial arts craze into art on Master of Kung-Fu and the team of Wolfman and Colan doing the same for vampires with Tomb of Dracula? What a time to be a fan! Marvel and DC were both on fire. Triumph Comics? Not so much. The truth is, I rarely read Triumph’s books, only when I was desperate, and, even in desperation, I found them to be consistently disappointing: watered down knock-offs of the Big Two’s best material. So why did I pick up the first issue of The Legendary Lynx? Something about Doug Detmer’s cover, I suppose: The image of a powerful costumed woman staring down the barrel of a gun without a hint of fear grabbed me. And Detmer’s interior art—so fluid, so dynamic, oozing darkness, despair, and yes, hope—was even better. Nothing of his I’d seen before came close. The visual storytelling was unlike anything else you could find in the Triumph line and it was in perfect sync with the scripts by Triumph mainstay Harvey Stern, who quickly went from easily dismissed hack to a god in my writing pantheon. The raw power of those stories was heightened by the fact that Stern died before they even saw print: I remember reading, and being shocked by, the tale of his murder in the New York Daily News. That loss, that tragedy, only underscored the sense of loss and tragedy that ran through the pages of The Legendary Lynx. But another tragedy was yet to be revealed: Harvey Stern hadn’t written those stories. They were the work of a ghost writer, a young Triumph staffer named Carmen Valdez, and when, years later, the truth finally emerged,...
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