Marvel Comics/Icon; $19.99

A young man finds himself immersed in the murky, shadowy world of espionage and his life is in danger from the start. Set in the 1980s, Fire was originally released as a two-issue mini-series by Caliber Comics in 1993. Since then it’s been re-mastered and collected by Image Comics in trade paperback (in 2001) and now finally collected in a hardcover by Marvel’s Icon imprint.

Why such attention to a two-issue, black and white mini-series without a superhero in sight?

Because a couple of decades before Brian Michael Bendis was the guy who’d ridden herd on the Avengers for nine or 10 years, before Powers and Ultimate Spider-Man and Daredevil and everything else, he was a writer-artist with a sharp wit, a distinctive style and a burning desire to do comics.

Goldfish, Jinx, Torso and everything else followed.

Impressively, it’s still fresh, lively and engaging. It pulls the reader in. What this story contains isn’t the epic tales, the flair or the polish that would soon be his trademarks as a writer.

What the reader sees here is, appropriately enough, the fire.