Reed Crandall's classic Captain Daring pirate stories from the golden age of comics collected into one volume Boardman Books' "character" collections bring together the adventures of rather obscure golden ago comic book characters in single volumes. The point of the volumes is not to focus on a particular artist but to rediscover a character generally lost to comics fandom. Stories are reproduced from vintage originals from the collection of the publisher (and other sources) with only rudimentary cleaning to make the art more legible and therefore suffer all the drawbacks that implies. If...

Reed Crandall's mastery of fine line detail and expertly nuanced pen-and-ink texture is a perfect fit for EC Comics. This collection of 21 Crandall favorites, delineated in his classically illustrative style, includes The Silent Towns, a Ray Bradbury story about the last man and woman on Mars; Carrion Death, a stark horror story about a man struggling through the desert with a corpse handcuffed to his wrist as the vultures circle closer; Sweetie-Pie, the grisly story of a ghoul who sets up a roadside hazard to procure, um, fresh meat; The Kidnapper, about a man who decides to kidnap a baby to...