Dark Horse Comics/It’s Alive Press; $79.99

Following his highly regarded runs on Master of Kung-Fu and Moon Knight and contemporaneously with the start of his stint writing the adventures of Batman, writer Doug Moench developed Aztec Ace, a creator-owned title published by Eclipse.

The wide-ranging story darts between science fiction, pulp heroics, mystery, and history. It centers on Caza (“Ace”), his travels between the 23rd century and the height of the Aztec empire. Teamed with a navigator named Head and a beautiful pupil, Bridget Chronopolis, Caza attempts to undo (or at least survive) time paradoxes created by Nine-Crocodile, an enemy who takes quite a bit to unravel.

Fans of Moench’s Master of Kung-Fu will be at home with philosophical (and sometimes whimsical) nature of the stories, but there really isn’t another comic book like Aztec Ace. Through it’s 15 issues (and one story from Total Eclipse), his scripts were illustrated by a team of artists that included Michael Hernandez, Thomas Yeats, Dan Day, Nestor Rendondo, and others, all of whom knew how to tell a story.

This book started as a crowdfunded project from It’s Alive Press, and while it took them quite a while to finally pull it off (including the untimely passing of It’s Alive publisher Drew Ford), this hardcover is a glorious and complete collection that calls to mind the incredible wave of creativity that swept through the comic industry in the mid-1980s.

– J.C. Vaughn