Joe Kubert's TOR - Volume Three!

The first two volumes of  Tor from the Joe Kubert Library by DC brought into print in a handsome and lasting form the first seven issues of the St. John comic book series from the 1950's. This third volume gathers together Kubert's later efforts on the character. 

We jump forward to 1975 and DC notices that Marvel's barbarian characters are doing quite well on the newsstands of the day, so they cook up some of their own and included in that is a revival of Tor. The debut issue features work that Kubert had done years before, which had already appeared in unfinished form in Alter Ego. Now Kubert has the chance to finish this tale from Tor's youth in which he learns about the harshness of life outside the confines of his clan. 

DC then reprints the St. John Tor stories, the 3-D ones in color for the first time. Kubert creates some exciting new covers for this run on the character. Kubert likely thought he have a chance to add more stories to the canon, but the series was canceled after six issues. 

But Kubert does create some new Tor anyway, but in a comic of his own making. Sojourn was an oversized effort to tap the independent market by offering comics that looked more like newspaper sections. I am much reminded by these issues of DC's Wednesday Comic sections they produced back in 2009, to which Kubert contributed some Sgt. Rock stories  actually. There are only two issues of 1977's Sojourn featuring work by Sergio Aragones, Doug Wildey along with two silent black and white Tor adventures.

In 1986 Eclipse Comics reprinted the groundbreaking Tor 3-D comics in two issues. Kubert produced some new artwork for the covers and that's included in the collection. 

It would be many years before Kubert made more Tor adventures, but he was given the chance by Carl Potts, then editor of Marvel's Epic line-up in 1993. In a brand dubbed "Heavy Hitters" Kubert created four magazine-sized issues of Tor. This is a departure from what he'd done before and it's actually one long epic tale which reprises and revises Tor's "origin" story. Clearly this is an attempt by Kubert to make Tor a little more gritty as his refined sense of justice evident in the early days is pretty rusty, though in the end he proves himself to be a worthy hero. Tor battles a gang of murderous cavemen as well as a bizarre clan of non-human creatures in the depths of a deadly mountain. The dinosaurs which had been such a significant part of the Tor landscape are largely missing from this story which relies rather on indistinct monsters. Further there is no room for little Chee-Chee in this version of Tor, such light-heartedness having no purchase in the bleak landscape that Kubert creates. The two Sojourn tales already mentioned were reprinted in color in these issues and appear in this library collection in that form. 

And that closes out the Joe Kubert Library presentation of Tor. But Joe wasn't done with his doughty caveman as he had one more tale to tell. More on that next week. 

Rip Off