Indiana Jones Omnibus, Vol. 1 by William Messner-Loebs

The colors are mostly gray and subdued and just make the story more boring than it probably is. The art on the third story, done by Leo Duranona, is overly sketchy, lacking in details, and hard to follow. The art really worked to get me in the mood of the story.

The colors are nice and bright and the stories easy to follow. His Indy captures the look and feel of the character without being a slave to Harrison Ford’s likeness. He’s got a classic style that makes the book look like an old adventure comic strip. Dan Barry handles the art for the first two stories. The art also adds to the problem I had with Indiana Jones and the Arms of Gold. It doesn’t really feel like much of anything at all. The problem I had with the third story is that where the first two move quickly and keep the feel of the movies, the third story is slow, a bit hard to follow, and just doesn’t feel like the movies. There’s nothing fancy about the story, and they really tie into the classic pulp fiction origin of the whole Indiana Jones mythos. The plots for all three are pretty much what you’d expect for an Indiana Jones story Indy learns about a fabled treasure, gets mixed up with some dizzy dame, fights the locals, and in the end saves the world while losing the treasure. The first two are must-reads for Indy fans, while the third really disappointed me, especially in relation to the first two. There are three out-of-print miniseries collected here, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Thunder in the Orient, and Indiana Jones and the Arms of Gold. In fact, this felt like just another movie starring everyone’s favorite globe-trotting archeologist. 1 doesn’t fall into the pitfalls common with bad books based on movies, at least for the first two-thirds.

Fortunately, this Indiana Jones Omnibus Vol. Either the artist does a poor job with the likeness of the characters, or the writer can’t get the feel of the source material right. Me personally, I can usually do without them. Licensed comics have got to be one of the hardest things to do well, but people seem to like them as there’s always been a bevy of books based on popular shows and movies as long as comics have been around.

Indiana Jones Omnibus, Vol. 1 by William Messner-Loebs