The Rook Archives - Volume One!

I was a Warren fan at just the right moment to latch onto The Rook by Bill DuBay and Luis Bermejo. As the collection notes, these are stories "from the pages of Eerie", a magazine which at this point in time shifting away from the one-off horror tales which had defined it as a younger version of Creepy. Eerie was giving the world offbeat heroes from across the span of space, time, and imagination, many with a decidedly anti-heroic nature. One of the good guys was Restin Dane, a handsome swashbuckling adventurer who just also happened to be a marvelous inventor and who became master of time travel.

(Gulacy's cover as published -- minus the fabulous detials.)

The first stories of The Rook saga are far and away the best. In these stories, collected under an robust Paul Gulacy cover presented for the first time in all its detailed glory, we meet Restin and his ancestor Bishop Dane, his robot assistant Manners, and others who fill the rough and tumble adventures with heart and specific character. These stories have the whipsaw charm that time travel stories can deliver with twists and turns coming at a breakneck pace.

If you read no other Rook stories, read these presented in The Rook Archives Volume 1. These are the ones which fixed the character into the popular imagination. He would become arguably for a time Warren's most popular character and his run only ended when his creator Bill DuBay left Warren for other climes.

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