Rip Kirby, Vol. 10

The longest-running modern adventure strip celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 1971. As Bruce Canwell notes in his introduction to this volume, John Prentice and Fred Dickenson continually varied the contents of their stories, mixing and matching themes, as well as locales. In these thirteen stories, they were willing to tap into popular topics of the day (1971's "The Girl with Something Extra" uses extra-sensory perception as a key plot driver), but carefully contrasted those efforts with stories emphasizing family relationships in ways both positive ("The Midas Affair") and negative ("Murder by Misanthrope"). The science fictional Doctor Data and his super-computer were counterbalanced by more light-hearted capers, such as "The Parrot Who Sang Like a Canary." Included are more than 800 sequential comics from April 27, 1970 to January 20, 1973 reproduced from the original King Features Syndicate proofs.