Warlord Wednesday: Interlude

Another Wednesday in Skartaris.  Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"Interlude"
Warlord (vol. 1) #36 (August 1980)

Written and Pencilled by Mike Grell; Inked by Vince Colletta

Synopsis: Shakira and Morgan are walking through the bustling markets of Bandakhar. Shakira is offended by the stench of so much humanity. Morgan is no more fond of the city than her, but they’ve heard anything can be bought their, and they need horses.

Their shopping is interrupted when Morgan hears a girl scream and rushes to help, heedless of Shakira’s warning (and his own previous experiences in Skartaris!) not to get involved. Morgan starts cutting down the uniformly dressed, bald men who seem to be trying to take the comely girl captive. Soon, all but two have fallen before the hellfire sword--and those two beat a haste retreat.

Shakira quips that they’ve barely arrived in town and Morgan is already making enemies. Morgan ignores her, noting the distinct tattoos on the men’s chests. The girl says its the “mark of the bat--the sign of the demon.” She gives her name has Karelle, but refuses to reveal why the men were after her. When pressed, she runs off saying that to be involved with her further would only put Morgan in danger.

Despite the girl's protests, and further sarcasm from Shakira, Morgan follows after her, leaving Shakira to seek the company of a feline companion.

Morgan’s “jungle-honed” tracking skills put him on the girl’s trail. He catches a whiff of her haunting, lotus blossom perfume, and knows she’s near by. He sees her running into the gate of a building's courtyard--and sees her followed by a hulking, satyr-like figure. He pulls his sword.

Morgan charges into the courtyard. He finds the creature attempting to strangle Karelle. He attacks, but with amazing speed, the creature slashes him with its claws. Morgan falls back, his own reflexes the only thing saving him from disembowelment. Clutching his wounded chest, Morgan tosses his sword at the creature’s throat. It strikes home, and the beast dies.

Karelle is unharmed. As Morgan retrieves his sword he again asks who’s after her. She’s still reluctant to say, but when its obvious Morgan doesn’t intend to drop the issue, she tells him she has the attention of a powerful, and unwanted, suitor. When her father refused him, the man--an evil wizard--decided that if he couldn’t have her, he would kill her. Karelle agrees that death is preferrable to being with him.  She has a poisoned dagger to end her own life, before she would submit to the monster.

Morgan won't allow it to come to that. Karelle asks why he would help her. Morgan replies: “You’re the first beautiful and gentle thing that’s heppened to me in longer than I can remember.” Karelle senses that Morgan is a tortured man, but she also senses gentleness beneath his tough exterior. Morgan warns her not to get too close, but Karelle replies she’s not afraid, and impetuously kisses him.

At that moment, Morgan final succumbs to his wound and passes out.

Karelle tends him in his delirium, and Morgan is unaware. Instead, he's lost in the dark past; he recalls being forced to kill his son, his wife’s anguish, and the man responsible--the devil-priest, Deimos.

Morgan awakens from his nightmare to find Karelle absent. He hears her scream from the next room, and stumbles after her, sword in hand. There he finds Karelle, dangling from her tied wrists, being whipped by Deimos!

Seeing his hated nemesis, Morgan goes into a berserker fury. Deimos tries to drive him back with magic, but the hellfire sword repels his sorcery. Morgan dismembers him with the blade, shouting the names of those he cares for whom Deimos has harmed. Even when Deimos has fallen, Morgan doesn’t stop. He hacks the priest into pieces as a horrified Karelle looks on.

Morgan cuts her free, but she pushes him away:

Later, Shakira finds him sitting in the rain. She’s got horses and in ready to live the city. She asks how Morgan made out. Morgan isn’t sure. His life was briefly touched by something special, and for that he should feel lucky, but instead he feels empty. He realizes that he’s been blaming Deimos for destroying everything beautiful in his life, but that really he’s the destroyer.

Shakira replies: “That girl...She must have been very special.” Morgan agrees that she was.

He and Shakira ride away, while Karelle watches them go with tears in her eyes.

Things to Notice:

• The seventies gives way to the eighties: Skartarian cutie Karelle has ditched the raccoon eye make-up of previous issues in favor of a fringed bikini top.
• There's something a little suggestive about a panel with a caption "the great sword hellfire throbs with power" over a close-up of Karelle with her lips parted.
• Deimos' third death is gruesome, but sort of anti-climatic.

Where It Comes From:
The mark of the bat chest tattoo sported by Deimos' cronies is clearly an homage to Batman's chest symbol.

The Weird Frontier

This cover deserves to be the basis of an rpg setting.

Well, maybe not just this cover all on its own, but the crazy idea it and the series (Tomahawk) it's a part of suggests (at least to me)--namely, combining the James Fenimore Cooper-style frontier tale with fantasy. Transplanting the whole civilization-against-the-wilderness thing to a colonial pseudo-America.

It’s almost completely unmined territory. It’s only been sort of attempted once, as far as I know--Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series does early nineteenth century fantasy in an alternate North America. Sure, one could point to novels (and even an rpg or two) with a kind of “Illuminati/Masonic magic behind the revolution” or a “Ben Franklin cavorts with the Hellfire Club” sort of deal, but all of that pseudo-historical “hidden magic” speculation fails to deliver a moment of rpg inspiration Zen like:

Wilderness adventures wouldn’t be the only way to go. Surely things like Mystery Hill, and the rampant speculation such sites inspired (even at the time) ought to suggest plenty of ancient American civilization to provide honest to goodness dungeons. There might not be demi-humans (though there could be), but all the other standard D&D ingredients are easy to find.

Maybe I’ll work on something like this once I’ve got Weird Adventures out of the way. Heck, the Strange New World was probably something like this, about a century and a half earlier then then the period I've been chronicling.

Muto-Scope

The Muto-Scope appears as some version of kinetoscope or early motion picture device. In reality, it is a magical artifact created for unknown purposes. It is often found in aging, second-rate arcades, or in the hands of collectors, where it’s true nature will often not be recognized.

Looking through the viewer and turning the metal knobs (marked with arcane symbols and metrics which no one is able to decipher) will allow the operator to focus in on any individual within a twenty mile radius he or she thinks of. The operator need not be aware that it's his or her thoughts bringing the target into the viewer for the scope to work.

Once a target is the viewer, turning the crank will cause mutation. Nothing short of magical shielding can protect a target from the effects. If the crank is turned clockwise, the target will evolve to a form in some (teleological) way more suited for their current environment. For example, intelligence might increase if that is what’s needed at the current time.

Turning the crank counter-clockwise will lead to devolution to a more primitive, ancestral form. First, more bestial, protohuman characteristics will appear, then baser mammalian ones, followed by reptilan traits. Fifteen seconds of scope operation on a target will lead to some minor atavistic traits emerging. A full minute will total transform the target physically into a more primitive, humanoid form.

In either direction, the duration and degree of change are related to the duration of crank operation. A minute of operation leads to changes lasting 1-6 hours, whereas ten minutes leads to changes lasting 1-6 days, and possibly (if a saving throw is failed) permanent. Both directions of change are ultimately dangerous, with clockwise ultimately resulting in a coldly intellectual, sociopathic, post-human monster, and counter-clockwise leading to a primitive beast of some sort.

Inspection of the device will reveal nothing about how it operates. Even disassembly (an action with unpredictable repercussions) is unlikely to provide any useful information. A small brass plaque low on the machine's back suggests it was manufactured by “Coppelius Novelties”, but a corporation of that name has been difficult to locate.

Happy Thanksgiving

Hopefully nobody has to stalk their own turkey like this Pilgrim maiden...

Warlord Wednesday: Bring On the Back-Ups!

For the majority of issues 29-88, Warlord featured a back-up story. One of these short series, Wizard World, was connected to the action of the main title, but all of the others were completely independent. Let’s take this Warlord Wednesday to look at the first two.

OMAC
First Appearance: OMAC #1 (1974)
Last Pre-Warlord Appearance: Back-up in Kamandi #59 (1978)--also the last issue of Kamandi
Featured as Back-up: Warlord #37-39, #42-47
Next Seen: DC Comics Presents #61 (1983)
His Story: OMAC (One Man Army Corps) was a Jack Kirby creation, a mohawked super-cop in the near future (“The World That’s Coming”). The Warlord back-ups were by Jim Starlin who had also done the back-up in the last issue of Kamandi.
How He's Like the Warlord: he fights for justice; his fashion sense is perhaps questionable.

ARAK
First Appearance: Warlord #48 (1981)
Featured as Back-up: (technically an insert) Warlord #48
Next Seen: Arak, Son of Thunder #1 (1981)
His Story: Arak was a Native American taken by Vikings to Carolingian Europe where he interacted with characters from The Song of Roland, and mythological creatures, in a very Robert E. Howard-esque way--not surprising since Arak was the creation of Conan’s original comics scribe, Roy Thomas. Arak’s series lasted for 50 issues.
How He's Like the Warlord: he swings a mean sword; he romances a warrior lady.

Adventurers of Yesteryear

The City's seen its share of adventures over the decades.  Many of them, both world-renown and relatively obscure, are celebrated in Munsen's "Life of Fantastic Danger" Museum.  Here are a few examples:

Enok “The Axe” Bludgett
A celebrity adventurer of the late of ‘40s (3840s, that is). The above tintype was sold all over the city.  He's pictured here with his favorite weapon, and axe rested from hands of an undead Northman whose dragonship thawed from an iceberg in the City’s harbor in 3842. Bludgett died tragically of an eldritch venereal disease contracted from a succubus just twelve years later.

Violet M’Gee
Stenography school dropout, turned adventuress. She's pictured here in 3875, with her legendary pistols--magical items supposedly made by an ancient forge god she and her companions discovered trapped in a bricked-up sub-basement in Yronburg.  She spent two months in a sanatarium suffering from the psychic backlash of firing a bullet made from the materia of the Outer Dark at the dread lich aviator, the Bloody Baron.

Colonel Balthazar Hacksilver
Southron Thaumaturgist and sometime ally of Bludgett. Though the title of “colonel” was an affectation, Hacksilver was knighted by Lluddish Queen during her first decanting. He’s perhaps best known for the ability--learned from a postherd recovered from a tomb beneath a mound of the Ancients in Freedonia--to remove his head from his body. Reportedly, Hacksilver’s body would fight on with his saber, while his head cast spells from a safe distance.  Some thaumaturgical scholars believe the amazing spell Hacksilver uncovered was incomplete, and therefore completely misinterpreted, which led to Hacksilver's eventual descent into the mental illness known as Ackerlast's Schism.  There is some disagreement as to whether his death is better termed a murder or a suicide.

Winter is Coming: Pics Prove It

I know I'm not the only one excited about the upcoming HBO series Game of Thrones based on George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, and the more set pictures I see, the more I feel like they're getting it right.  Entertainment Weekly's got a whole series of pics on their website.

I'm glad the armor and clothing have more of a historical feel than is generally the case for TV fantasy (like the recent Legend of the Seeker).

Here's Stark sons Bran and Jon Snow.  Barrington (Snow) isn't really how I pictured him, but that's to be expected.

I think Nikolaj Coste-Waldau is great choice for Jaime Lannister--and check out that armor.

Daenerys' costume does seem a little generic fantasy-ish, though Emilia Clarke wears it well.