Like I said, nothing but respect for MY president.

I mentioned this issue on Twitter the other day, but wasn't going to blog it right away, even though I love it and had a hard time finding a copy in the quarter bin. (I totally still have my old one, but still!) But let's jump in anyway: from 1984, Warlord #84, "Hail to the Chief" Written by Cary Burkett, pencils by Dan Jurgens, inks by Dan Adkins.

I was going to hold off a bit since this was towards the end of a multi-issue time-travel storyline, ranging from the present New Atlantean war in Skartaris, to a post-nuclear war America in 2303, to ancient Atlantis. But we're getting ahead of things there: in 2303, after the suicide of the president, who had been the pawn of a traitor trying to consolidate power, Congress proclaims Travis Morgan the new President of the United States! A surprisingly sheepish Travis asks "Why me?" and is told post-nuke communications make an election unfeasible, but his leadership had been proven. Travis balks at accepting, but Shakira tells him he's the only man for the job. (His tantrum and her ensuing pep-talk are the second and third pages of the issue, pushing the title's traditional double-splash pages back to four and five!) Travis is immediately swamped with duties (and a tailor pushing a new wardrobe!) and has to chase them out of the Oval Office at swordpoint...

After a visit to the present to check in with Jennifer Morgan and Tinder, we cut back to several weeks into Travis's presidency, and it's not going well: the nuclear war had damaged earth's ecology behind any repair. Frustrated at having to manage it, Travis has the idea to stop the nuclear war before it occurred, and checks with his friend Dr. Reno. Reno explains maybe, in theory, the timeline could be altered, but there's no guarantee of a better tomorrow. Still, it was more doable than Travis could have guessed, since they already had time-travelling ships, in a cavern deep below a mountain in Utah...that sounds very familiar to Travis. Reno realizes the time-travel experiments there may have caused a "time-stasis field," cutting the mountain off from regular time, or else those ships would have been used during the nuclear war.

Reno, Travis, and his companions Shakira and Krystovar head to the mountain; where Reno explains the situation to the scientists that had only lived two years while centuries passed on the surface. Below the mountain is the cavern, which Travis had first seen at the start of the storyline in Warlord Annual #2. They plan to use the flying-saucer style time ships, to change history...!

Also this issue: another chapter of the Barren Earth, in which Jinal and her friends are taken to visit the embassy of the Old Ones, which has technology far beyond what she had expected. Indeed, the Old Ones may have been responsible for the earth's most recent inhabitants, the lizard people and the "mushroom folk" the Mulge. Jinal petitions the Old Ones' speaker for them to help her unify the planet against the alien Qlov, but as the speaker shows her images of some Qlov stranded like she was, he asks why they should side with her? To Jinal, they're obviously the bad guys, since their war had gone on for years; but the speaker tasks her with capturing one of the Qlov for questioning...(Story by Gary Cohn, art by Ron Randall.)

Although I would pick up most if not all the back issues eventually, this was the second issue of Warlord that I know I bought: I had #66 first, but can't remember how I got it exactly; but I read Warlord off the racks from #83 to the end.