3 April 2016
As Sydney is one of of the guests of honour at the prestigious Lucca comics convention this weekend, I thought that this would be a good opportunity to have a look at some of the Italian imprints of the Jeff Hawke stories.There have been quite a few Italian collections of the Hawke material but the most extensive are the Milano libri and the Albi dell’ avventura collections . Milano Libri are published in hardback volumes and are the most comprehensive series spanning the entire sequence of Hawke stories from H1 to H8865. Albi dell’avventura are large format paperback volumes which usually cover just one
Hawke story per volume . They go from H1 to only H 7422 . The latter series are printed a little larger than the Milano libri and for my money they reproduce the strips in slightly higher quality, retaining all the subtleties of Sydney’s fine shading and cross-hatching which tends not to stand up so well in the hardback collection. However, both series are well produced and volumes from both can be found on Italian eBay . Skipper Prossitt
Hi Skipper! I’ve been picking up some of these Milano Libri volumes from ebay lately and wondered if you had any idea why the later volumes are so expensive? The first half dozen or so are on sale for really low prices – less than £20 in some cases – but the final few volumes suddenly rocket to at least £80 plus and I have seen a few on offer topping the £100 mark. Any insights as to what the reason for that might be? Also, Fondazione Rosellini produced a 2 volume set of many McLane/Hawke stories, some in colour and backed up with loads of background material and articles which, regrettably, I can’t understand (hah!)although I suspect some of them may have originated in “Cosmos”. Very reasonably priced these at 35 euros for 200 plus pages. No – I’m not a sales agent btw – just letting fellow fans know what else is out there.Cheers!!
We did a review of the two Rosellini books here in early 2015