Written By: Mike Grell
Art By: Mike Grell, Rob Prior, Steve Haynie
Cover Price: $2.50
Sale Date: June 1995
*Non-Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
The work of veteran comics
creator Mike Grell is well-known and impressive: for DC Comics he wrote the Legion of Superheroes, Warlord, Batman,
and famously wrote and drew the mini-series The
Longbow Hunters for Green Arrow. Independently, he did Jon Sable, Freelance
and would later pen and draw a James Bond
story of his own for Eclipse Comics. Even more recently, he has written Iron Man for Marvel and returned to DC
for work, including a return to Warlord
some years back. So I had some high hopes going into this Starslayer book,
despite it being the second issue and the cover looking like something found in
the diaper of the 1990s comic book speculation boom. Was my enthusiasm
warranted, or did this turn out to be another disappointment like my many
attempts at creating an all-feline NASA? Read on and find out!
Explain It!
From Reggie’s Box of Comics Crap:
About a year ago, my brother-in-law e-mailed me a deal on groupon.com:
thirty bucks for seventy-five bucks worth of comics shipped from some store
near Washington, D.C. Out of curiosity, I went for the deal, and about six
weeks later I got a box containing a handful of comics worth a few bucks
apiece, and about eighty other comic books, mostly from independent publishers
in the 1990s, that would be rejected from most respectable quarter bins. I’ll
be diving into this box from time to time, and share my findings with you, the
reader, so that you never ever in your life ever patronize another deal from
groupon.com again.
 |
| I hate being a teenager! |
So this comic book is
written and drawn by Mike Grell, and as such it looks like a comic written and
drawn by Mike Grell. If you’ve read The Longbow Hunters, then you know his
style and it is used to good effect here. I think his sense of storytelling is
impeccable and really evokes an older style that is comforting to me, and
doesn’t involve the jagged, splintered panels scattered all over a page today.
We begin on the British Isles in 43 AD, where Celtic warrior Torin MacQuinnon
is out hunting with his son Brann. On the way back home, they come across a
band of Roman warriors, which Torin dispatches all by his fucking self. There’s like six of them and he just rocks
their worlds. He tells his son that they could probably claim allegiance to
Rome and avoid conflict, but he says it’s better to live as a ruthless sumbitch
than die a slave. Or something like that.
 |
| By shading his eyes, he magnifies his sight a hundred times |
Torin spies Roman ships
approaching the shore, so he and Brann hurry home and raise the alarm. Torin
tells his wife Gwynyth that they must abscond to the woods and attack the
Romans guerilla style, but she says her father, Hadwyn, will never go for it,
which is sort of a big deal because he is chieftain. Hadwyn wants to barter
with the Romans, and thinks that he can cut a good deal with Emperor Caesar
because he’s got a plus-ten Cloak of Haggling. Torin reminds everyone that he’s
from some village that tried to make a deal but ended up losing at the big
roulette wheel and the entire village was razed. Then there are like five pages
of Torin and Hadwyn going back and forth, just talking on and on until it’s
decided that Torin and his family will go their way, Hadwyn and the rest of the
village will try to appease the Romans. Old Ivor also decides to go with Torin,
even though he admits to being useless.
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| And don't forget to buy Torin MacQuinnon brand sword wax! |
Torin and his crew set
forth into the woods, and on the way they meet Ambrosius the Druid that lives
in the trunk of a tree. He’s elderly and senile, but not too whacked-out that
he can’t make a few prophecies about Brann’s great-great-great-great grandson
and how things will go with the Romans. Brann tries to steal a sword, but
Ambrosius upbraids the young whippersnapper and drives the sword into an iron
anvil. Now, this might surprise you but I’m not actually an expert on ancient
Briton history, so I looked up Ambrosius. Turns out this was the full name of Merlin
from the legends of King Arthur: Merlin Ambrosius. And I suppose this implies
that the sword in the anvil will become the legendary sword in the stone,
pulled by King Arthur? And perhaps the great-great-great-great grandson of
Brann will be said Arthur?? Is that the point of this scene? Because otherwise
it seems to come from nowhere and is dismissed almost immediately.
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| And that's how the myth of Santa Claus was begun |
Forging deeper into the
woods, Torin turns around to see the Romans have reached his village and are
speaking with Hadwyn, who balks at the meager offerings they have made.
Unwilling to leave them to their fate, Torin storms back to his village and
takes on the whole Roman army, with help from the disgruntled villagers, until
he is again standing on a heap of armored corpses looking like he’s got a few
strands of hair out of place. Though he fights valiantly, Torin MacQuinnon
recognizes that he is outnumbered, and decides to go out with honor, with a
warrior’s cry and his weapon outstretched as he leaps upon the spear tips of
advancing Roman soldiers, and upon hitting the spears, he vanishes in a puff of
green smoke…and reappears in some giant canister aboard a stripper-manned
spaceship???
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| This is exactly how Disney's The Black Hole ended |
I have to admit, I didn’t
expect that. I was getting into this engaging, if wordy story about one man’s
fight against the Roman legion during Christianity’s early years, but on the
last page (or two pages, considering it’s a pretty nice double-page spread) the
story does a complete twist and I am left wondering if anything I just read was
ever resolved in the comics. For a second issue, this reads an awful lot like a
first issue—perhaps this is the “director’s cut” of the first issue, which was
published by Pacific Comics before they folded. But then why not just make this
the first issue at a new publisher? Perhaps there was an issue before this, but
I can’t imagine what it might have contained, a testament to Mike Grell’s
expert and thorough storytelling form. This comic is not a rollicking fun ride
from cover to cover, but it is cool to look at and moves at a nice clip that
makes for an enjoyable reading experience. I don’t know if I’ll go looking for
any issues of Starslayer in the wild,
but if I find a few other issues in my Box of Comics Crap, I won’t mind reading
them.
Bits and Pieces:
This was actually a pretty
cool comic book. The story was a little drawn out in the middle, but it was
paced really well and every page looks great, with a few vertical spread pages
that are suitable for framing. What does that even mean, “suitable for
framing?” It means “flat,” doesn’t it? I mean, anything is suitable for framing
if you feel like framing it. I could frame my loyalty card from Five Guys but
it wouldn’t make it something worth framing. Unless there was a loyalty card
where you could accrue points indefinitely, and then I could be the highest
scoring patron at Five Guys. You could frame it and affix it to my tombstone
next to a free bag of peanuts and a ridiculous amount of hand-cut French fries.
8/10
Such a underrated series!
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