Review by Frank Plowright

Considering Lobo was phenomenally popular in the 1990s, the character has been woefully underserved by collections. It’s almost as if DC were somehow ashamed that something so lowbrow was such a success. Back in the day only The Last Czarnian and Lobo’s Back’s Back were ever collected, later combined as Portrait of a Bastich, while a pair of larger 2018 volumes concentrated on Lobo as written, and sometimes drawn, by Keith Giffen. Until the Big Fraggin’ Compendium there’s been no comprehensive gathering of all the Lobo material. It picks up with his first appearance, avoids 1980s guest appearances and his membership of L.E.G.I.O.N., jumping to Lobo’s first solo run in 1990, and thereafter roughly four years of the Main Man, both in his own titles and as a guest in others.

The one creator involved with almost everything is Alan Grant, only absent for around sixty pages. He supplies the dialogue, and therefore much of the tone, to Giffen’s early plots, before becoming the main writer, which was a real liberation to a fundamentally anarchic personality used to the censorship of British weekly titles. Although it takes the artists to show the excess, it’s Grant’s sly humour that conceives the situations allowing Lobo to kick off again and again.

Artistically, it’s Simon Bisley who shows the way. As originally drawn by Giffen, Lobo looks weird, but not greatly threatening. It’s Bisley who transforms the look into that of a space biker, wild and intimidating, and ramps up the violence into cartoon excess. The art that doesn’t quite hit the spot is by artists to whom restraint is a way of life. The sample art is from Bisley and Val Seimeks, who by virtue of being good, and able to hit a deadline ends up as the artist on Lobo’s eventual ongoing series.

So what does Lobo get up to? He kills Santa, he’s hunted down by his many children, is turned into a woman, attends the San Diego Comicon, takes a contract on Gawd, becomes involved with a mob accountant, is turned into Lobocop and his bounty hunting career faces many other stumbling blocks.

Worth noting as not just a good Lobo story, but a thoroughly under-rated slab of comedy gold is ‘Un-American Gladiators’. It reunites Grant with former writing partner John Wagner, and the pair of them with Cam Kennedy, artist on many of their great Judge Dredd stories, and the totally forgotten, but equally good Outcasts. Lobo and the Outcasts are participants in the televised the Maim Game, and it’s one great comedy set-up after another.

You can drop Lobo into almost any kind of situation, but being a big, near enough invulnerable brute who revels in exaggerated cartoon brutality, he’s only ever going to react in one way. At 1300 pages this is one hell of a lot of Lobo, and even die-hard fans might find it repetitive, so it’s best paced.