Lost Marvels #2

History

The Lost Marvels series was conceived as a joint publishing venture between Fantagraphics and Marvel Comics, designed to bring rarely or never-collected material back into print in deluxe hardcover editions. The second volume centers on Howard Chaykin, who broke into Marvel in the early 1970s and created Dominic Fortune for the Code-free black-and-white magazine line beginning with Marvel Preview #2 in 1975—a character conceived as a lighter, more sardonic reinvention of his earlier Atlas/Seaboard creation, The Scorpion. Monark Starstalker, Chaykin's lone self-contained sci-fi bounty hunter story, appeared in Marvel Premiere #32 in 1976 as part of Marvel's format for showcasing emerging talent in done-in-one stories. The War Is Hell: The First Flight of the Phantom Eagle component, a five-issue MAX miniseries from 2008, brought Chaykin back to Marvel as artist on a script by Garth Ennis, reuniting two creators whose sensibilities—hardboiled war realism and pulp genre revisionism—proved well-matched. The collection is introduced by author and comics scholar Brannon Costello.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Published August 12, 2025 by Fantagraphics as the second volume in the collaborative Fantagraphics/Marvel Lost Marvels hardcover series.
• Dominic Fortune (real name Duvid Jerome Fortunov / David Fortunov) was created by Howard Chaykin and first appeared in Marvel Preview #2 (1975), in Marvel's Comics Code-free black-and-white magazine line; the character was based on Chaykin's earlier Atlas/Seaboard Comics creation, The Scorpion.
• The volume collects all of Chaykin's color-comic-book Dominic Fortune stories, including the character's four-issue MAX miniseries (2009)—the latter reprinted here for the first time in a Fantagraphics edition.
• Monark Starstalker, Chaykin's retro-science-fiction blind bounty hunter who relies on a golden mechanical falcon named Ulysses, made his debut in Marvel Premiere #32 (October 1976); this collection includes that debut appearance.
• The Phantom Eagle (Karl Kaufmann), a WWI masked ace originally created by writer Gary Friedrich and artist Herb Trimpe in Marvel Super-Heroes #16 (September 1968), is represented here through the complete War Is Hell: The First Flight of the Phantom Eagle—a five-issue MAX miniseries (2008) written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Howard Chaykin, set in the alternate-reality continuity Earth-200111.
• War Is Hell: The First Flight of the Phantom Eagle runs 111 pages in total and is set against the bloody realities of World War I aerial combat, specifically the period of 'Bloody April' 1917 during the Battle of Arras.
• Dum Dum Dugan (Corporal Timothy Aloysius Cadwallader Dugan), created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and first appearing in Sgt. Fury and his Howling Commandos #1 (May 1963), appears in the reprinted Dominic Fortune material, reflecting Fortune's place within Marvel's 1930s–WWII-era continuity alongside Fury's network of operatives.
• The collection is introduced by Brannon Costello, described by the publisher as an author and comics scholar, providing historical and critical context for Chaykin's Marvel work across its 1975–2008 span.

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