Still another Quality reprint title: from 1986, Spellbinders #1, featuring stories by Pat Mills and Ken Mennell, and art by Massimo Belardinelli, Kevin O'Neill, Eric Bradbury, and more.
52 pages for a buck and a quarter, which seems like a pretty good deal, but I don't think this had any newsstand distribution so you would've had to have a comic shop around to find it. The first two features reprinted were only a few years old at the time: from 1983, Slaine, "The Beast in the Broch," and from 1984, Nemesis the Warlock, "The Gothic Empire." Neither strip was the first for them, either! Why they started with Slaine's second strip, instead of including his six-page first appearance, I couldn't tell you. Were their earliest appearances reprinted somewhere else, or did they want to hit the ground running? I have no idea.
The Nemesis story guest-stars Ro-Jaws from Ro-Busters and ABC Warriors, serving as Nemesis's valet: woo, shared universe! The last feature is a chapter of "Amadeus Wolf, Stalker of the Supernatural," which I didn't find a lot of information about with a quick search. There was a racehorse named after him though, that once raced another horse named Johnny Alpha, a.k.a. Strontium Dog! Amadeus may have been a retitled feature, though: originally it was "Cursitor Doom" from Smash! Comics. Why the name change? Well, Cursitor.
Oh yeah, those tighty-whiteys are definitely for the benefit of us prudish Americans.
ReplyDeleteThat bit where he uses fire for deodorant was cute though.
I believe they were there in the original version, actually. Been a while since I read that particular chapter. Can't really speak on Amadeus Wolf/Cursitor Doom but Slaine was mostly written in arcs of adventures and the first story wasn't part of one. As for Nemesis, most of the early stuff had already been reprinted in a very nice miniseries (even got retouched art for the American market).
ReplyDeleteAlso, yay Ro-Jaws! He's a lot of fun.