100 Pages of amazing adventure at the Earth's Core!DC decides to reward The Warlord, one of their most popular titles, with a digest collection. The Warlord was an odd title--as its creator Mike Grell suggested, it exitsed its own little universe(though unofficially, I think) and it never had anything to do with the rest of DC's publishing line.
This was trade paperback-esque collection, in that it reprints a complete multi-part story, collectively called "The Deimos Saga", comprised of:
"Arena of Death" (Warlord #3), story and art by Mike Grell
"Duel of the Titans" (Warlord #4), by Grell
"The Secret of Skartaris" (Warlord #5), by Grell
"Home is a Four Letter Word" (Warlord #6) by Grell
"The Iron Devil" (Warlord #7) by Grell
"Tower of Fear" (Warlord #10) by Grell
"Holocaust" (Warlord #15) by Grell and Joe Rubinstein
"Wolves of the Steppes" (Warlord #17) by Grell and Vince Colletta
"Battlecry" (Warlord #20) by Grell and Colletta
"The Beast in the Tower" (Warlord #21) by Grell and Colletta
...plus a fun little bio page of Grell on the inside back cover.
This book is probably the closest you'll ever get to feeling like DC is simply printing someone else's book--there's no mention, or ads, for anything other than Warlord and no mention of any other creator than Grell. Indeed, with some of the intense violence and pretty-dang-revealing costumes:
(yowza!)
...Grell's book always felt like it was an independent book that accidentally had a DC bullet dropped on its cover...um, every single month for twelve years.
4 comments:
Never got into Warlord, but I will admit making sophomoric jokes about the female character you pictured (her name escapes me). It involved erasing those bikini straps and saying she could use a razor.
I know, I was a little sexist pig. Puberty does strange things to people.
Chris
Shakira.
I collected every Grell issue of this way back in the day. It's like Conan for 10 year olds. After Grell left in '82 the book was taken over by future Superman artist/scribe and all-around dull storyteller Dan Jurgens. He brought a lot more LOTR style fantasy and magic to the book. Needless to say his Warlord wasn't fit to wear Grell's loin cloth.
An interesting thing about this digest is that they don't even reprint complete issues. The storyline unfolded two or three pages at a time over the course of several issues. Each issue would have it's own stand-alone story that cut to a MEANWHILE, NAKED DEIMOS IS RESSURRECTED AND THIRSTS FOR REVENGE. This explains why the digest opens with a final climatic battle.
Again, Warlord never looked better than when Colletta inked Grell's pencils. I have an original art from that team that gets tons of compliments.
Well, never thought I'd find a comment saying that Warlord looked better with Vince Colletta inks than Mike Grell's. I couldn't agree more, not to say that Mike's inks were bad, just not as nice as Colletta's.
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