Lion Man was originally the creation of Orrin C. Evans, but could essentially have been described as a Black Tarzan. Lived in the jungle but had a formal education, super athletic, wore just a loincloth, fought against white colonialists... Evans did a good job with and it didn't feel entirely redundant, mind you, but it was still a pulpy jungle action story. Arguably, he was the first Black superhero. The Adventures of Lion Man reprints that first appearance to kind of level-set the reader as to where they're coming from.
We then get three new stories featuring different takes on Lion Man: "The Tower," "A Plague on the Nation," and "The Lion Outside." The first and last are written by John Jennings, the middle one by Bill Campnell and Yvette Lisa Ndlovu. All of the story art is by David Brame. I won't got into the specifics of each story, but to say that they interestingly take the Lion Man concept in very different directions. In one story, he's treated sort of like a Black Panther character, in another he's fighting an interdimensional villain in a story that seems like it might be at home in a Dr. Fate comic, and in another he seems to be split between life as a scientist in the real world and a superheroic fighter in the dreamscape not unlike the Garrett Sanford version of The Sandman. Each of these versions -- and indeed the original written by Evans -- are solid takes on the character and reflect a 'missing' history not unlike The Sandman character concept, which has also had taken radical conceptual turns since the original gas mask wearing vigilante debuted in 1939.
I like the idea that, you know, maybe we've had Lion Man stories published sporadically since 1947 and the character had been "re-invented" repeatedly for different audiences. Much like Sandman and Dr. Fate and Black Panther. This book, then, might represent a snapshot of those different re-inventions, which is a really neat idea I think. I might've liked to have seen different artists' takes on those ideas, too. Brame definitely does a good job re-designing the characters for each story, but they do all utilize his same artistic style, and I can't help but think that bringing in additional artists would've helped to differentiate the story approaches that much more visually. We get a hint of that with the pinup section at the back with illustrations from a variety of different artists, but it would've been neat to see that more in the stories too.
There's also Fantomah story included in the book as well by Damian Duffy and Brame. Fantomah is another public domain character that's gotten a little more attention than Lion Man thanks to creator Fletcher Hanks' bat-shit-crazy approach to comics. Here, she's been re-imagined as a Black wrestler that operates in a kind of supernatural version of the WWE.
I think one of the big takeawys from The Adventures of Lion Man is to encourage creators of how many creative directions they can go using already existing ideas. It's kind of a tired trope already that when a character lapses into public domain, someone makes a slasher horror version of them. But the creative team here instead shows that there are plenty of other interesting directions you can take a character like that. The point is even more poignant if you're familiar with Jennings' interest in the horror genre to begin with -- that he didn't go that route with his stories here emphasizes the other options even more. All in all, the stories are all fun takes on existing characters you might not be familiar with and because they go off in different directions, you don't need to have any familiarity with them in the first place!
As I said, the book was originally crowd-funded and those copies are being mailed out right now. The book should become available to the public in the next couple of weeks from Rosarium Publishing with a list price of $19.95 US.
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