ATHENA VOLTAIRE – COMPENDIUM
By Steve Bryant
Dark Horse
240 pages
When’s the last time you were able to buy a terrific comic book hardback for $20? You’re probably scratching your head right now and coming up with squat. That’s because it’s been that long a time since a superb, quality comic package like this was made available at such a great price. Okay, enough of the sales pitch and no, we don’t work for Dark Horse.
Steve Bryant’s Athena Voltaire is a gorgeous female version of Indiana Jones. And that’s really all you need to know about the character to jump right into her adventures; all of which read like they could easily have been adapted as Republic Studio cliff-hanger serials starring Linda Stirling. And now that we’ve said that, I think Stirling would have made a great cinematic Athena.
Athena’s father was a famous stage magician, she grew up traveling the world with her parents, became a stunt pilot and eventually began her own flying services. It is the 1930s and the Nazis are popping up all over the globe looking for arcane artifacts their Fuehrer can use to rule the world. In the five colorful graphic adventures collected between these covers, Ms Voltaire travels from Tibet to Mexico and lots of other exotic locales to thwart these agents of the Third Reich from allying themselves with all kinds of demons and monsters. Trust us, her adventures are always fast paced, thrilling and action packed.
In this era of the New Pulp Movement, Athena Voltaire shines as one of the finest pulp heroes ever created. If you truly love pulp, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book. Then once you’ve have, buckle up for adventure. With Athena Voltaire it never stops!
