Episode 85 - Reviews of Simon and Kirby: Horror! and Trees #1 - a podcast by Stergios Botzakis & Derek Royal

It’s Wednesday, which means it’s time for your weekly visit from the doctors! This week on the show the Two Guys with PhDs review two new titles. First, they look at the latest in Titan Books’ Simon and Kirby Library series, Simon and Kirby: Horror! This beautiful volume collects all of the Black Magic and The Strange World of Your Dreams (Prize Comics) stories that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had a hand in, in one form or another, published between 1950 and 1954. Many of these comics have been collected before — for example, DC’s brief reissuing of Black Magic between 1973-1975 and Craig Yoe’s The Strange World of Your Dreams collection that came out last year — but this is the first time all of the Simon and Kirby contributions have been brought all together and in chronological order. As Andy and Derek point out, there’s some wonderful stuff in this collection, macabre stories in the vein of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone and the creepiest of Hitchcock. Next, the Two Guys turn their attention to issue #1 of Trees, written by Warren Ellis with art by Jason Howard. This is an intriguing first issue, one that teases…but in a good way. The guys are particularly pleased with this latest effort from Ellis, in that they’ve been wanting more original and ambitious (and non-mainstream) stories from him, as demonstrated in Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Planetary, and Desolation Jones. They feel that Trees promises to follow in this tradition.

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