DC had taken notice of Marvel's success with Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian and wanted a pice of that barbarous pie. To that end they cooked up a bevy of rough and tumble fantasy heroes and launched them all at once onto the comic stands. The one that succeeds will be a nifty twist on the Edgar Rice Burrough's creation Pellucidar.
Among these new titles were a revival of Joe Kubert's Tor, a new hero called Stalker by Steve Ditko and Wally Wood, a new an different version of Beowulf, a caveboy named Kong, a classic "Conanesque" barbarian named Claw and even Justice Inc., a comic version of the Street and Smith pulp hero The Avenger. Also tucked away in this mob was Warlord created by up and coming comic art star Mike Grell. Warlord was originally part of a project Grell called Savage Empire, but was retooled a bit for the seventh issue of 1st Issue Special.
Warlord tells the tale of Travis Morgan, a brave and resourceful United States jet pilot who is shot down in 1969 on a spy mission over the former Soviet Union. He is able to get his injured craft over the Arctic and crash lands but finds that he's actually entered a weird interior territory named Skataris tucked away inside the Earth's crust. It's a land of perpetual day where time loses meaning. Morgan quickly finds himself allied with a lovely warrior named Tara. The two end having to escape from a heinous wizard called Deimos and that's where this saga stops. That is until it continues in the pages of the debut issue of Warlord's own comic which goes on to run for an impressive one hundred and thirty-three issues.
Warlord is only one of two ideas from 1st Issue Special which actually succeeds in launching a series -- the other we will get to in due course. Next time we have another wonderfully crafted story of heroics and sorcery, but this one is in modern times.
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