The Lost (and Forgotten) World of the Warlord

One of my favorite comics from the late seventies and eighties, Mike Grell's The Warlord, has hardly ever seen print in trade paperbacks and has been largely forgotten after two unsuccessful revamps. This doesn't change the fact that it was a brilliant series, and that I would give almost anything to have some of WL's best storylines reprinted in graphic novel format. While Marvel had Conan and The Savage Sword of..., DC's answer to the sword and sorcery genre was Travis Morgan and his band of heroes in the Lost World of Skartaris (situated in the center of the earth, accessible only through a breach in the earth's crust somewhere in the antarctic. How cool is that? A La Marvel's The Savage Land, but WAAAAY better).

This hidden world of perpetual sunlight not only spawned a host of interesting characters, but made for some truly excellent stories of near unlimited scope and potential. Morgan, as the Warlord, served as adviser and general to Queen Tara of Shamballah, fighting menaces like the beast men from New Atlantis, the sorcerer Deimos, dinosaurs, monsters, Gods and even threats from the surface world. The supporting cast consisted of characters like Shakira (a were-cat woman) Machiste (a powerful black dude with a spiked steel ball as a fist), Mara (an ex-Russian pilot) and numerous others...Man, writing about this just pisses me off even more since storytelling like this might never come along again. Sure, there are excellent writers out there right now, but none who excel at this type of story, i.e. fantasy with a smattering of sci-fi every now and then (in the form of ancient Atlantean technology). Ah, sweet nostalgia...

I don't own all the comics. In fact, I probably only have a little more than half of the 130 + issues published, but I've made it my mission in recent years to acquire every last one (most are available as back issues via Ebay - even though it's gonna cost you. God, the price we pay for our passions...)

Well this concludes my rant about yet another excellent series that has disappeared into the obscure alleys of history, and be warned - there are many more aimless rants to come! The universe is an unfair place, and needs a healthy dose of criticism to set it right. REPRINT THE WARLORD, for Shamballah's sake, you DC bastards! Realistically speaking, they might not sell a lot of copies, but damn there were some good stories, and if the rest of the modern comic reading public can't see that, then point me to the nearest time machine, because I wanna go back to the eighties.