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Blackjack: Second Bite of the Cobra
"It is so pleasant to know that in an era that is still chock-a-block overflowing with superheroes Spandex-clad that there is still room for heroes from the old school." — Examiner.com
A tale of blood and vengeance set in the rip-roaring 1930s, this graphic novel stars Arron Day, alias Blackjack, an African-American soldier of fortune. Blackjack returns to his boyhood home in Cairo, joining forces with martial-arts expert Maryam and mercenaries Bo and Red to seek long-overdue revenge on a charismatic Bedouin warlord known as The Cobra.
Hailed by Publishers Weekly as a Notable African-American-Interest Title, this Dover graphic novel marks the first time that issues 1–3 of Book 1: Second Bite of the Cobra have been collected in one deluxe edition.
Exclusive Bonus
• New Foreword by Joseph Illidge, editor of No Man's Land
• New Afterword by award-winning inker David Colley
• New cover art by Scott Hanna
A tale of blood and vengeance set in the rip-roaring 1930s, this graphic novel stars Arron Day, alias Blackjack, an African-American soldier of fortune. Blackjack returns to his boyhood home in Cairo, joining forces with martial-arts expert Maryam and mercenaries Bo and Red to seek long-overdue revenge on a charismatic Bedouin warlord known as The Cobra.
Hailed by Publishers Weekly as a Notable African-American-Interest Title, this Dover graphic novel marks the first time that issues 1–3 of Book 1: Second Bite of the Cobra have been collected in one deluxe edition.
Exclusive Bonus
• New Foreword by Joseph Illidge, editor of No Man's Land
• New Afterword by award-winning inker David Colley
• New cover art by Scott Hanna
112 pages, Paperback
First published July 15, 2015
15 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
March 11, 2021
A solid if unexceptional read. It's missing the fun of other 30's adventure books.
March 11, 2021
#ThrowbackThursday - Back in the '90s, I used to write comic book reviews for the website of a now-defunct comic book retailer called Rockem Sockem Comics. (Collect them all!)
From the February 1998 edition with a theme of "A Tenuous Konnection":
INTRODUCTION
Most months the theme for this kolumn is so obvious it just kind of kicks me in the kranium. I've apparently taken a few too many kicks to the kranium, however, bekause this month it took a shoe horn, aksle grease, and dukt tape to kram a tenuous konnection into the following komik book reviews. Kan you guess it? Kan you forgive me?
DOUBLE DOWN ON DANGER
BLACKJACK Volume One #1-3 (Dark Angel Productions)
BLACKJACK Volume Two: Blood & Honor #1 (Dark Angel Productions)
Remember the wild and relentless action of the "Indiana Jones" movies? Set in the 1930's just before World War II, BLACKJACK invokes the spirit of those films but has a major twist: instead of Harrison Ford, imagine "Indiana" played by Ving Rhames.
"Blackjack" is a African-American mercenary named Arron Day. His adventures, set in 1935, carry him around the globe. While Day is frequently forced to deal with the prejudices of the people around him, BLACKJACK is not a contemplative study on race. Instead, it's an all-out action yarn with a feverish pace and a main character who just happens to be black.
In the first BLACKJACK mini-series, Day is driven by personal demons to hunt down and confront an Egyptian brigand who humiliated Day's father seventeen years earlier. In the second series, "Blood & Honor," Blackjack travels to Japan to protect an advocate of peace who has been targeted by business and military interests for assassination. Frequent gunfights and hand-to-hand combat will keep any action junkie fully engaged while surreptitiously slipping him a little bit of historical information.
With a style lying somewhere between Joe Kubert and Howard Chaykin, Joe Bennett's artwork in the first BLACKJACK series is truly superb. His dynamic panels are marred only by occasionally confusing layouts which may cause a reader to view panels in the incorrect order. The second BLACKJACK series is drawn by a group of artists named Lashley, Batista and Caesar. They do a good job, falling only a little short of the standard set by Bennett. Unfortunately, the trio perpetuates Bennett's tradition of occasional poor flow between panels.
Writer Alex Simmons deserves an immense amount of praise for creating an engaging hero and the interesting scenarios, and I only wish I could extend the praise to his writing. While Simmons' dialogue is crisp and credible, the narrative text is distractingly over-written. Simmons needs to overcome the urge to cover the fabulous artwork of his collaborators with captions filled with needless verbiage. Also, Simmons' plots aren't overly complex, which allows the action sequences to overwhelm the book, giving the reader plenty of sound and fury with little significance.
In BLACKJACK -- as in many of the comics being produced today -- good art is hampered by mediocre (but promising!) writing. But still -- unlike many comics being produced today -- the character of Arron Day reaches out and grabs me, and I plan to catch his future adventures whenever possible.
Grade: C
From the February 1998 edition with a theme of "A Tenuous Konnection":
INTRODUCTION
Most months the theme for this kolumn is so obvious it just kind of kicks me in the kranium. I've apparently taken a few too many kicks to the kranium, however, bekause this month it took a shoe horn, aksle grease, and dukt tape to kram a tenuous konnection into the following komik book reviews. Kan you guess it? Kan you forgive me?
DOUBLE DOWN ON DANGER
BLACKJACK Volume One #1-3 (Dark Angel Productions)
BLACKJACK Volume Two: Blood & Honor #1 (Dark Angel Productions)
Remember the wild and relentless action of the "Indiana Jones" movies? Set in the 1930's just before World War II, BLACKJACK invokes the spirit of those films but has a major twist: instead of Harrison Ford, imagine "Indiana" played by Ving Rhames.
"Blackjack" is a African-American mercenary named Arron Day. His adventures, set in 1935, carry him around the globe. While Day is frequently forced to deal with the prejudices of the people around him, BLACKJACK is not a contemplative study on race. Instead, it's an all-out action yarn with a feverish pace and a main character who just happens to be black.
In the first BLACKJACK mini-series, Day is driven by personal demons to hunt down and confront an Egyptian brigand who humiliated Day's father seventeen years earlier. In the second series, "Blood & Honor," Blackjack travels to Japan to protect an advocate of peace who has been targeted by business and military interests for assassination. Frequent gunfights and hand-to-hand combat will keep any action junkie fully engaged while surreptitiously slipping him a little bit of historical information.
With a style lying somewhere between Joe Kubert and Howard Chaykin, Joe Bennett's artwork in the first BLACKJACK series is truly superb. His dynamic panels are marred only by occasionally confusing layouts which may cause a reader to view panels in the incorrect order. The second BLACKJACK series is drawn by a group of artists named Lashley, Batista and Caesar. They do a good job, falling only a little short of the standard set by Bennett. Unfortunately, the trio perpetuates Bennett's tradition of occasional poor flow between panels.
Writer Alex Simmons deserves an immense amount of praise for creating an engaging hero and the interesting scenarios, and I only wish I could extend the praise to his writing. While Simmons' dialogue is crisp and credible, the narrative text is distractingly over-written. Simmons needs to overcome the urge to cover the fabulous artwork of his collaborators with captions filled with needless verbiage. Also, Simmons' plots aren't overly complex, which allows the action sequences to overwhelm the book, giving the reader plenty of sound and fury with little significance.
In BLACKJACK -- as in many of the comics being produced today -- good art is hampered by mediocre (but promising!) writing. But still -- unlike many comics being produced today -- the character of Arron Day reaches out and grabs me, and I plan to catch his future adventures whenever possible.
Grade: C
August 5, 2025
This was like a five star action comic book of a bygone era and even socially daring for that era, but now perhaps feels a little dated.
It’s clear that Alex Simmons had a very strong cinematic idea of what he was going for with Blackjack and he did achieve that idea completely well.
There was a simplicity to it in a very good way, and in a way that didn’t work for me. I understand that he is working with character archetypes from 40 and 50 years even 60 years before he wrote this and that the time of writing was 30 years ago. So there’s a chance I’m missing some significance twice removed. I also understand the main character is one of those men a few words. And yeah, I feel like much of the motivations of the main characters are left to either boiler plate kind of cliché’s in the case of the main characters or, in the case of the villains, to artistic ambiguity.
The main girl was a bit of a cliché for being like a survivor of trauma with impossibly curvy proportions, but you could also see a real character shining through there beyond the genre, conventions and clichés
I like this enough that I’m gonna check out another blackjack, comic, mainly because I would like to see if once the characters are established, Simmons does anything extra with their own observations about their place in the world, something that happened in the background of this comic, but was not the text of the comic. Or, if like Robert E Howard’s Conan, he just wants to make straightforward adventure stories about his character. Either one will be good, but I can’t make a full accounting of where this guy is at or where this guy is coming from until I read another one.
This is one of the rare cases where I think this would be a better movie than a comic book
It’s clear that Alex Simmons had a very strong cinematic idea of what he was going for with Blackjack and he did achieve that idea completely well.
There was a simplicity to it in a very good way, and in a way that didn’t work for me. I understand that he is working with character archetypes from 40 and 50 years even 60 years before he wrote this and that the time of writing was 30 years ago. So there’s a chance I’m missing some significance twice removed. I also understand the main character is one of those men a few words. And yeah, I feel like much of the motivations of the main characters are left to either boiler plate kind of cliché’s in the case of the main characters or, in the case of the villains, to artistic ambiguity.
The main girl was a bit of a cliché for being like a survivor of trauma with impossibly curvy proportions, but you could also see a real character shining through there beyond the genre, conventions and clichés
I like this enough that I’m gonna check out another blackjack, comic, mainly because I would like to see if once the characters are established, Simmons does anything extra with their own observations about their place in the world, something that happened in the background of this comic, but was not the text of the comic. Or, if like Robert E Howard’s Conan, he just wants to make straightforward adventure stories about his character. Either one will be good, but I can’t make a full accounting of where this guy is at or where this guy is coming from until I read another one.
This is one of the rare cases where I think this would be a better movie than a comic book
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 8, 2016
Fun in a classic, pulpy kind of way, this book has an intrepid hero, far off lands, horses, gun fights, and biplanes. I loved the art, especially the square speech bubbles and the symmetrical splash pages. Everything about this comic from the early twentieth century setting to the slightly hyperbolic writing really gave the feel of an old adventure comic, written for a modern audience.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys comics.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys comics.
May 21, 2016
The debut mini series in the BlackJack is collected in trade paperback form and gains a strong edge while maintaining the episodic, movie serial, charm of the original.
To start: Arron Day - known throughout the globe as Blackjack - is an experienced, well traveled, soldier-of-fortune who dances with death for a living. As a hired gun he has fought wars where the side you choose is the side that pays, your word can get you work or killed and right or wrong are just words in a dictionary. He is also a black man dealing with the issues in 1930's America that even his wealth and worldly knowledge cannot isolate him from.
Into the mix comes a revenge saga. A charasmatic leader known as Cobra - a militsary warlord with ties to Arron's past - has resurfaced and Arron has taken on a possible suicide mission to take him on once the mysterious figure resurfaces after disappearing almost a decade before. What follows is a globe trotting thriller that blends elements of Lawrence of Arabia with Raiders of The Lost Ark with a blend of Bourne Identity (to give psuedo-current reference) to boot. Alex Simmons and artist Joe Bennett (known for his work on Marvel's The Punisher among other things) made this a pleasure to read from cover to cover. Wheteher you're familiar with the character or just getting to know him read the series that started a legend for either the history or a plain good time.
To start: Arron Day - known throughout the globe as Blackjack - is an experienced, well traveled, soldier-of-fortune who dances with death for a living. As a hired gun he has fought wars where the side you choose is the side that pays, your word can get you work or killed and right or wrong are just words in a dictionary. He is also a black man dealing with the issues in 1930's America that even his wealth and worldly knowledge cannot isolate him from.
Into the mix comes a revenge saga. A charasmatic leader known as Cobra - a militsary warlord with ties to Arron's past - has resurfaced and Arron has taken on a possible suicide mission to take him on once the mysterious figure resurfaces after disappearing almost a decade before. What follows is a globe trotting thriller that blends elements of Lawrence of Arabia with Raiders of The Lost Ark with a blend of Bourne Identity (to give psuedo-current reference) to boot. Alex Simmons and artist Joe Bennett (known for his work on Marvel's The Punisher among other things) made this a pleasure to read from cover to cover. Wheteher you're familiar with the character or just getting to know him read the series that started a legend for either the history or a plain good time.
May 1, 2016
Seventeen years ago, in the waning days of the Great War, Arron Day watched his father, soldier of fortune Mad Dog Day, walk back into Cairo, humbled by defeat at the hands of the Cobra, a Bedouin warlord fighting to evict the British from his people’s land. The Cobra spared the lives of those he defeated, leaving them to their shame as he disappeared back into the desert....
Full review available at http://noflyingnotights.com/2016/03/2...
Full review available at http://noflyingnotights.com/2016/03/2...
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews