EP0092: Kings Watch, Batgirl and the Birds of Prey, Vol. 3, and Ms. Marvel, Volume 1

Summary: It’s a team-up of classic comic strip characters in <a href="https://amzn.to/2L5VgpF">Kings Watch</a>.<br> Batgirl and the Birds of Prey have an all-female team to fight a deadly case of man-flu in <a href="https://amzn.to/2Pt5AZA">Batgirl and the Birds of Prey, Volume 3: Full Circle</a>.<br> Finally, as the Captain Marvel movie approaches, we take a look at the star of Carol Danvers’ Miss Marvel series in <a href="https://amzn.to/2QjlOK2">Ms. Marvel, Volume 1: Best of the Best</a>.<br> Affiliate link included.<br> Transcript below:<br> King Features comic strip characters join forces to save the Earth, then we take a look at the last volume of Batgirl and the Birds of Prey, and the first volume of the May 2000’s Miss Marvel series with Carol Danvers, straight ahead.<br> <br> Welcome to the Classy Comics Podcast where we search for the best comics in the universe. From Boise, Idaho here is your host, Adam Graham.<br> Alright, well we lead off with a look at King’s Watch. Now King’s Watch came after Jeff Parker’s really good run on Flash Gordon. He did a good Flash Gordon solo series. I’d read it as it came out, it was just a lot of fun – really captured the fun and got me interested in Flash Gordon as a character, and this series really starts out as a bit of a reboot. The entire history and continuity these characters had from the Flash Gordon comics isn’t really in place here, so that they can start on building this extended King’s feature world. And so you have a group that includes Flash Gordon and Dale Arden as a science reporter, and Zorkov who was written as the drunk who’s somewhat functional. And then you have the Phantom and Mandrake the Magician, and also Lothar.<br> The plot is that Ming the Merciless is planning an invasion of Earth through another dimension, and he has this super villain – Cobra – acting as his lackey on Earth. I think the plot is really well done. It’s got a very good sense of the sort of invasion event comic, with enough peril as well as enough positive turns to really keep you interested and invested in the story. I think that there’s some good characterization but it can be a bit spotty. A lot of the characters are very one-dimensional – Zorkof and King Drunk, and the Phantom is not really well-defined in this one, though I think there is some reason for that.<br> This series does have a resolution but it does set the stage for future Kings Feature series, and I think the hope of Dynamite in publishing this series was that you would read this event, and then you would go and pick up all of their mini-series for Flash Gordon and Mandrake and the Phantom. Now, I read their Flash Gordon one which was not written by Jeff Parker and it wasn’t bad, but I think I’ve read mixed reviews about the other series. This one though, I think, can be read on its own and be enjoyed for just being this great invasion story, and also if you’re a fan of the 1980s series Defenders of the Earth you get to see some familiar characters in that regards. So this is a really good event comic. The more you’re into these Kings Feature strips, the more you’re going to get out of it, but even not knowing much about them other than what I knew of Flash Gordon, I still found it an enjoyable read. I’ll give this one a rating of Somewhat Classy.<br> Then we get to Batgirl and the Birds of Prey and Full Circle which is a nine-Issue collection because the series was brought to an end, and so you get a bit of an oversized book just to go ahead and fit all of the Issues into a single volume. The story opens with a one-Issue story, Gotham City Limits, and Barbara decides to hang out around Gotham while Helena AKA the Huntress takes her class as she’s become a school teacher along with Dinah Lance AKA Black Canary. Barbara hangs around Gotham and in the course of this she d...