I’ve been slowly catching up with the Marvel Masterworks program but I just had to jump ahead and get this special 300th volume. Featuring a duck trapped in a world run by hairless apes: Marvel Masterworks Vol. 300: Howard the Duck!
Am I the only one who has a bit of a ritual when unwrapping new books?
Carefully, pierce the shrink wrap and peel it back. Now take a sniff – that first whiff of the chemicals. Can’t beat it!
Anyways… about the book itself! This is a special 300th volume of the Marvel Masterworks and to mark the occasion Marvel published three versions with different dust jackets: the standard silver and black, the more usual variant version featuring the ‘marbled’ design and this one.
Fully unveiled: Front cover and… 
…back cover
At 376 pages this is quite chunky for a Masterworks and contains Howard the Duck #1-14, Marvel Treasury Edition #12 and material from Fear #19, Man-Thing #1, Giant-Size Man-Thing #4-5 and FOOM #15.
So sure, it doesn’t contain nearly as much as the Howard the Duck Omnibus or volume one of the paperback Complete Collection series, but it covers all of Howard’s earliest appearances.
A Fully Restored Duck
One of the USPs of the Masterworks series is the restored art of course. Conveniently I’ve got a copy of Howard the Duck Complete Collection Vol. 1 handy so let’s compare a couple of pages from each book…
To my untrained eye, the Complete Collection actually does a pretty good job of retaining the line work. The restoration in the Masterworks however, goes further particularly with respect to the colours. Compare it to a scan of issue 1 (I used the entry available at the Grand Comics Database) and the shading in the smoke from Howard’s cigar (why that caught my eye, I don’t know!) is apparent while it’s a flat white in the Complete Collection.
An Anthropomorphic Duck and a… Man-Thing?
Howard actually first appeared as a supporting character in a dimension hopping story starring Man-Thing (stop sniggering at the back!) in Adventure into Fear #19 by Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik.
However, the masterful Gene Colan was the main penciller on the issues of Howard the Duck collected here.
This volume also includes Marvel Treasury Edition #12 where the back cover is the same scene from the front cover, but viewed from the back!
This issue of Marvel Treasury Edition has the front cover scene… 
…viewed from the back on the back cover!
All in all, a really special way for Marvel to mark the 300th volume.
