The World of Tiger Lung

Tiger Lung series of stories by Simon Roy (Prophet), assisted at times by Jason Wordie, published in a collection by Dark Horse. The title character is a shaman in Eastern Europe in the late Paleolithic era, the mediator for people between the material world and the world of spirits--a world not that far away, but alien to most.

In its fundamentals it recalls Muktuk Wolfsbreath, Hard-boiled Shaman. The story "Song for the Dead" even follows the formula of the Wolfsbreath stories: a conflict with a spirit reveals a secret transgression in the human world. But where the Muktuk Wolfsbreath series wrings some humor from juxtapositioning the activities of a Siberian shaman with dialog in the style of hard-boiled fiction, Tiger Lung plays it straight

Roy is not trying to write a standard prehistoric comic in the Tor or Kong the Untamed vein (not that those aren't cool in their own right), but more resembles Shanower's Age of Bronze in his attempt to create a level of (pre-)historical verisimilitude. It's most definitely fantasy, though, with its realms of the dead, various spirits and even were-hyenas. The only fault in the collection is with only 3 stories, it's all too short.

Art by Simon Roy