Nightmaster - A Sensational Sword And Sorcery Saga!

Three of my all-time favorite covers from DC are the three Showcase comics covers by Joe Kubert featuring Nightmaster. Aside from these tasty images, Kubert had nothing else to do with the character who is sometimes mentioned as the first sword and sorcery character in comics (not true but more on that tomorrow). 

(Jerry Grandenetti)

The story written by Denny O'Neil. in the debut issue was drawn by the painfully overlooked Jerry Grandenetti  and the last two issues of the singular trilogy are famously drawn by an up-and-coming Berni Wrightson, still a raw talent learning his craft on the job before our very eyes. You can read all three Nightmaster Showcase adventures here, here, and here.

(Berni Wrightson)

 For the record Denny O'Neil wrote all three issues. But I did find one a Mile High and it came yesterday along with some other treasures. This morning for the first time ever, I was able to read the Nightmaster saga all the way through. It held up pretty well. This is sometimes called the first Sword and Sorcery comic book. That's not true, but it does precede the wave of S&S prompted by success of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian. With Conan, Kull, Thongor, Gullivar, Dagar, Ironjaw, Wulf, and a wave of others hitting the stands in the Bronze Age and beyond, the Nightmaster was forgotten. 

(More Berni Wrightson)

The story is a bit more whimsical than I recollect, with a sense of irony clearly inspired by Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, who would soon enough get their own DC title. But it was neat heady blend of Tolkien and Burroughs and Leiber with a smidge of Howard tossed into the brew. Good stuff, not as full-bodied as most barbarian heroes, but neatly modern still after all these decades. 

I'd love to see these reprinted, but now that I have the originals at last, I don't really need that. 

Here's Nightmaster as rendered by Wrightson for a fanzine. The promised series featuring the character did not materialize. In fact after this three-part story, the character vanished for many years until surfacing in the pages of Animal Man and later Swamp Thing. Eventually he became part of DC's magical team Shadowpact and even rated a one-shot comic of his own which sported a new Wrightson cover.

But for the most part, Nightmaster is what he always was, a weird blend of superhero and sword and sorcery, a could'a been comic book character. But those are still some blockbuster Kubert covers.

This post is dedicated to the late Berni Wrightson. 

This Post is a Revised Dojo Classic. 

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The Viking Prince!

The Viking Prince is a creation by Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert. The majority of the stories in this terrific little run were written though by Bob Haney and Bill Finger. Kubert is the artist throughout, though Irv Novick supplies many of the covers featuring the character. The feature debuted in the pages of The Brave and the Bold as part of a trio of features starring heroes from sundry historical eras. We have the Golden Gladiator from Rome, the Shining Knight from Medieval times and the Prince likewise from Medieval era but a bit further north.

The premise of the Viking Prince stories is pretty straightforward and originally quite formulaic, at least at first. Prince Jon is found by a village of Vikings and is suffering from amnesia. (They named him "Jon" but it turns out that was his real name anyway.) He stays with them and helps them out of one terrific jam after another and battles against an old rogue named Thorvald who apparently knows the secret of his birth but seems threatened by it. This goes on for a while with a lovely damsel named Gunnda. The early stories are adventurous but largely magic free with seemingly supernatural threats like a giant ice dragon having more prosaic explanations. I almost got the sense that Jon was rather like Adam Strange, a visitor from a distant land who arrived and helped the locals with his wits and skills to deal with threats which bewildered them.

Then the abruptly the story changes and we have Prince Jon and a mute companion named Bard traveling around while Jon performs the "Twelve Tasks of Thor". The stories pick up some length and some verve as real magic abounds. Jon goes to lands below the waves, beneath the Earth and even ends up shrunken in a Lilliput Viking kingdom. Always he reunites with Bard and they travel on. These are my favorites of the series, and it's a shame more of them weren't created. These stories fully qualify the series as a legit sword and sorcery series as there is no doubt that magical lands abound and that all sorts of demons and gods are out and about.

Then the premise changes again as we get the "origin" of Prince Jon and meet his dad King Rikk. There's another love named Asa, a blonde beauty who is betrothed to Jon for future benefit of two kingdoms. He though is obliged to rescue her and his father a few times while he battles all sort of threats to the kingdom. He is the loyal son now and must fight more than a few times to keep his rank as heir to the throne. Once again magic seems a bit more real as he gets a strange dragon-shaped mark in the final story which appears to have been a means to give him a specific weakness by deadening his arm in specific moonlight, not unlike Kryptonite or a Green Lantern's deficiency around yellow.

If the characters were clearly all the same "Viking Prince" these reboots would be clearly set ups for different series, but in the wacked out world of DC at the time, they were just all about the same character, continuity be damned.

Eventually Prince Jon ends up in the pages of a Kubert war book and battles alongside the World War II icon Sgt.Rock and his Easy Company. Here he gets silver hair not the blonde he's sported since the beginning and we find him trapped in ice in a cave. (Steve Rogers ring a bell?) He gets out and we learn he has been imprisoned by Odin himself and cast down from Valhalla because he was putting the moves on a Valkyrie. Lost in the WWII setting, he join Rock on a suicide mission, Jon himself eager to die fighting so that he can return to Valhalla. There is intrigue but eventually he gets his wish and yet a fourth premise is established for the series, but one which is never followed through upon. Stranger and stranger.

This post is dedicated to the late Joe Kubert. 

This Post is a Revised Dojo Classic. 

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Gil Kane's Sword Of The Atom!

I was not following DC when Dick Giordano decided to shake up the Atom's status quo and greenlighted a proposal by veteran Atom artist Gil Kane and writer Jan Strnad. It was some years ago that I found a very cheap copy of the 2008 reprint collection of those vigorous Sword of the Atom stories. 

They took the venerable Silver Age superhero and member in good standing of the Justice League of America and kicked him out of this world and into a whole other one, one overflowing with high science-fantasy concepts. Professor Ray Palmer quit being the resident superhero of Ivy Town and became something of a John Carter wannabe in the hidden depths of the Amazon jungle. It was a bold move, powered to no small extent by Gil Kane's pure and potent artwork.

In the first issue of the four-issue limited series, Ray discovers his wife Jean is having an affair, and in a snit heads off to South America to put some distance between them. He quickly falls victim to drug smugglers while trying to locate the source of some white dwarf star radiation and finds himself stranded at six-inches tall in the vast Amazonian jungle. Quickly though he encounters savage golden-skinned warriors led by a red-haired beauty named Laethwen who is the daughter of the king of a local city called Morlaidh.

We quickly learn that the tiny golden people descended from the stars many years before and their society fragmented into various tribes spread through the jungle, savage warriors living alongside super science which had become unreliable. Ray Palmer now calling himself merely "Atom" becomes a gladiator and later a member of the resistance who seek to free the people from a tyrant who it turns out is Laethwen's father.

Atom becomes a leader of the opposition preparing the rebels for an attack on the city and meanwhile falling love with the lovely princess. He also takes time to learn to ride frogs,  and battle the creatures of the jungle such as snakes and crocodiles which have become even more dangerous to our six-inch sword-wielding protagonist.

The battles are ferocious. and this DC comic dishes up some real life and death struggles as the rebels find that the attack has released the toxic radiation of the very power which brought them to this world. As the city crumbles, the Atom growing all the while seeks to drive the population to safety before the inevitable explosion. He does so, but himself is knocked unconscious and is discovered on the bank of the river to be returned eventually to his wife who has since come to Brazil to find him. The story ends on something of an unfinished note as the two prepare to talk about what life has delivered to them.

The results of that conversation would not be revealed for a full year when the relative success of the four-issue limited series produced a one-shot special. This story is somewhat cleverly told, at least in part, as selections from a tell-all book written by one Norman Brawler. In this tale we learn that Ray and Lori have separated amicably and that Ray returns to the jungle to try and find the golden-skin lover he left behind some time before. He does and, that forms what seems to be the basis for many a new story.

Alas it only yields a few more. The first picks up the next year when Jean is shrunk and by a complex series of events ends up lost inside the Amazonian jungle. The Atom and his people work to find and free her from the grip of a tyrant to uses mind-controlled hawk-riding warriors to do his bidding. It's not a story which the premise suggested, but it is nonetheless another bonanza of Gil Kane artwork. There is a resolution of sorts, and the saga then ends for several years.

In 1988 Jan Strnad teams with Pat Broderick to tell one more tale of Atom and his golden princess, but this one is not really all that good to be honest. Broderick's work is a big decline from Kane's elegant drawing, and frankly the story itself has precious little to do with Atom himself. Instead, we get a somewhat overwrought morality yarn about civic duty and zombies. It's a poor finish to a series which had all the potential in the world to yield up some barnstorming fantasy adventure.

Either the writers didn't know what to do, or editorial was reluctant to go whole hog on the concept. But that doesn't mean there isn't some wonderful adventure sequences in these stories. The Atom brandishing a sword is not a notion that would've occurred to me, but it's an image I am most fond of having seen it presented with such gusto, at least in the beginning.

This post is dedicated to the late great Gil Kane. 

This Post is a Revised Dojo Classic. 

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Echoes Of Love From The Heart Of The Atom!

Under this beautiful Dave Cockrum cover art is a beautiful story of love for Marvel's original misfit monster, the always incredible Hulk. Heat of the Atom collects the Jarella stories from across many years of the Hulk's comic. Jarella is the beautiful blonde princess who loves the Hulk and who he loves too. Their romance is one of Marvel's most tragic.

The saga actually begins as something of a stunt. In the early Bronze Age comics were still groping for relevancy in the broader social spectrum and successful science fiction writer Harlan Ellison added to the cache of the form when he agree to plot some stories for Mighty Marvel. Two stories that he produced ended up as The Avengers #88 which is the first part of a tale that continues into Hulk #140. Roy Thomas wrote both tales.

The Avengers story by Thomas, Sal Buscema and Jim Mooney is not included in this trade, but is summarized in the first few pages of the initial Hulk story lusciously illustrated with Herb Trimpe breakdowns and Sam Grainger finishes. Essentially a monster name Psyclop in service to his other-dimensional masters needs to shrink the Hulk into what we now called the microverse. The Avengers try to stop this but fail and then are removed from the story by the simple trick of mind erasure.

The story continues in a tale titled "The Brute that Shouted Love as the Heart of the Atom!",  which is a variation of the title of a Harlan Ellison short story collection. Roy even goes so far as to include the titles of other Ellison tales in the dialogue and narration of the story itself. As I said, this was pretty much a stunt.

In the story, the Hulk finds himself on the microverse world where the lovely and exceedingly green Princess Jarella rules the kingdom of K'ai. After defending the city from giant warthog-like monsters the Hulk is hailed as a hero and soon enough becomes the consort of the Princess herself, who has an eye to making him her hubby. Needless to say, the Hulk who has his raging mind calmed by the magics of Torla, Holi, and Moli (three wizards) is rather happy to stay.

But Psyclop has other plans and the Hulk is ripped from his potential  happiness. Psyclop is defeated of course but the Hulk has seemingly lost paradise.

Some time later through magic Jarella comes to Earth but is followed by an assassin. She finds the Hulk again, but once again the pair are parted before they can find happiness. This is neat little story by Archie Goodwin, Chris Claremont and the awesome Herb Trimpe and John Severin team.

Then thanks to Goodwin and Trimpe and the science of Hank (Ant-Man) Pym the Hulk returns to the Microverse world to battle himself as it were in defense of the Kingdom of Ka'i and to protect his Princess. That it doesn't end happily is likely not much of a spoiler.

The Hulk ends up in the Microverse again thanks to Len Wein and the absolutely fabulous art team of Sal Buscema and Joe Staton. To be honest it was the art of these two working in tandem which got me over on this trade. I love how Staton's finishes add an almost luminous luster to Buscema's breakdowns and on whiter paper the art looks even better than I remember. This time Hulk finds Jarella again, just in time to save her from the clutches of a revived Psyclop.

The pair survive and actually arrive on Earth where (spoiler alert) poor Jarella dies to save an innocent life. The Hulk needless to say is a tad upset and goes on a classic rampage.

The Defenders step in and help slow him down, at least long enough to come to terms with his grief, at least a bit. The saga of the Hulk and Jarella seems to finally be over.

But then Bill Mantlo writes up a neat little tale expertly illustrated by Sal Buscema, which has the Hulk take Jarella's body back to the Microverse where he finds a devestated land. After battling the Gardner, Jarella is laid to rest at last and one of the great Marvel love stories comes to an end.

There is a What If which postulates what might've happened if Jarella had lived. It's clever enough, but sadly doesn't have the emotional punch I'd have expected of a story like this. Written by Peter B. Gillis and drawn by Herb Trimpe the story follows the Hulk as he becomes a hero of the world of K'ai and saves the world. I have to confess the John Buscema cover showing Jadejaws in full-Conan mode might be the best thing about this humdrum little outing.

The Hulk found a profound peace when he was with Jarella. That was comforting not only for him, but for his fans who from then on knew it was possible. Sadly, that peace was all too brief, but then that's what great stories are made of.

This post is dedicated to the late great Herb Trimpe. 

This Post is a Revised Dojo Classic. 

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