The Log Of The Jolly Roger!

I was not especially a fan of Mike Grell when he first broke into comics. Now that's not all Grell's doing by any means, as he had the great misfortune in my eyes of following Dave Cockrum on The Legion of Super-Heroes. I adored Cockrum's revised Legion and found Grell's attempts to evoke the same smooth vision of the future less impressive. His figurework always struck me as idiosyncratic, if not awkward. His finishes seemed glossy and impressively sleek, but his layouts left me unconvinced.

With Starslayer at the fledgling Pacific Comics he began to win me over. While the weaknesses are still evident, they are diminished in importance by a rougher inking style which does shine a lantern on them. Also the sweeping saga of the Celtic warrior who is transported into a future space opera is pretty compelling. It's got a lot of classic John Carter about it but with a more tech-savvy veneer.

We meet our hero, a bloke named Torin Mac Quillon, who is battling the invading Roman legions even as his adopted people, the Celts, are considering a peaceful surrender. Mac Quillon is convinced this is a losing strategy and takes his wife and son along with a loyal follower into the forest to fight against the invaders.

But he's snatched at the very moment of his death by Tamara, a futurisitc space-traveler who conscripts Torin in her search for a piece of technology which hopefully with bring some measure of peace to a war-torn solar system. Having little real choice Torin agrees and gets some nifty new toys to use in battle as well as a robot sidekick named SAM. We follow Torin as he and Tamara sail through the space ways aboard a beautiful spaceship seeking the missing tech.

The series completed its original run with its final Pacific issue before shifting over to the new First Comics to continue the run there. Grell stepped away from the book after two more issues after that transition and allowed it to continue under other hands where the saga became embedded in the larger First universe, such as it was.

In the 90's an offshoot of Valiant called Windjammer published an eight-issue "director's cut" of the saga and that has been collected in a single volume earlier this year by Dark Horse Comics.  Looks like a handsome volume.

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