Legendary Lynx Review

Back in the 1970s, when the comic direct market system was just getting started, Triumph Comics entered the picture in much the same way that Atlas and Pacific and Skywald and other pubishers did. And, like them, they saw some success. Not to the levels of DC or Marvel, certainly, but they did respectable numbers and gained a number of fans. Not all of their titles were winners, of course, but there were a couple that stood out, notably The Legendary Lynx. It would later be considered influential to those in the know, and there's a pretty direct line to Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns about a decade later. Writer Harvey Stern died before the first issue actually hit the stands and artist Doug Detmer comitted suicide shortly after finishing issue #11. The series petered out soon after. While most of the issues have never seen print since their initial debut, the first four issues are collected here for the first time.

Or at least that's the story we're told about The Legendary Lynx, via an introduction by J.M. DeMatteis and some back matter material by Brian Cronin.

This isn't the first time readers have been offerred some comic lore that had been previously forgotten in the form of 'reprint' material. Curio & Co. produced several of these types of books -- all of which are meticulously executed -- and Marvel's original promotion material around The Sentry character had some real world mythos built up around it. In all of these cases, they were all brand new creations with an invented backstory to, aside from arousing additional interest, provide some context for how the material should be viewed. We should be viewing The Sentry's backstory as akin to other characters from the late '50s and early '60s, and try to look at it through the lens of what several decades of continuity does without the emotional baggage of nostalgia coloring readers' perceptions.

The Legendary Lynx follows a similar pattern. What did comics that were just outside the mainstream look and feel like? What is the experience of reading that type of material -- again without the baggage of nostalgia -- feel like today in 2024? Creators Alex Segura and Sandy Jarrell attempt that here, although with enough of a nod and a wink that there's no real question what you're getting. (And to be clear, the nod and wink are in the promo copy, not the story itself.)

Back in the day, I did actually read many of the comics that Segura and Jarrell are trying to emulate here. While I was admittedly more interested in Marvel at the time, my dad found many of these comics while I was rifling through back issue bins and I was able to read the ones he picked up after I had re-read the latest issue of Fantastic Four half a dozen times. And what Segura and Jarrell do here with Legendary Lynx is indeed pretty impressive in that regard. It feels very much like a book that could've been published by Atlas or Pacific or Skywald. Some of the elements -- like thought balloons -- are an obvious enough differentiator from contemporary comics, while some are noticeable but not glaringly so -- like the bare-minimum basic origin recap in every issue -- and others are stylistic flourishes that are hard to pinpoint but you can't help but be vaguely reminded of some comic you read forty years ago.

Interestingly, there are still some subtle "tells" that this is new material. The lettering was all done digitally (most visible on the sound effects) and the color holds that are used are too complex to have been used before computers. I mean, I suppose they technically could have been done back in the '70s, but there's no way anyone would've put that much time/effort into that many of them for a 25¢ comic book in 1975. They're not trying to make a perfect replica of a 1970s comic here; they just want to give enough of a feel of one that you can buy into it.

And from that standpoint, they do an excellent job. It absolutely reads like a comic I might've read at the foot of our basement stairs just around the corner from where Dad kept his comics back when I was 12. Is it enough to give you a sense of nostalgia? I suppose that depends a bit on what you were reading back then. While I say that it reads like one of those books I read back in the day, I didn't find myself absorbed in it in the same way. To be fair, a lot of what I read back then was engaging because I was coming across new-to-me concepts in almost every issue I picked up because I was still so new to the hobby, and there is almost no way to replicate that now that I'm in my 50s. I can't tell if the experiment here is on trying to get the reader to actually feel like a kid reading one of those books back in the '70s or if Segurra was simply testing himself to see if he could write in that particular style. Regardless, it's a decently enjoyable read on its own merits and is worth picking up if you want to see what coming across Ms. Mystic or The Scorpion back then would've felt like.

The Legendary Lynx came out from Mad Cave Studios about a week ago and retails for $17.99 US. It should be available from your local comic shop and all major book sellers.

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