Random Happenstance

A pleasant side effect of having been at my job about as long as I've been at this blog, is that I do get a fair bit of vacation time; so I took a little extra time off last week. Which somehow didn't translate into getting any posts done: I couldn't tell you when I wrote, or rewrote, that Warlord post from Friday, but it was scheduled for next year or later and I had to move it up. But, somewhere in that time off I picked up a spare of the next issue, the conclusion of the "Morgan's Quest" storyline! From 1987, Warlord #116, "Revenge of the Warlock" Written by Michael Fleisher, art by Ron Randall. Cover by Mike Grell.

Tara is gracious enough to accept Mariah's apology, for trying to steal her husband with magic; again, it's ambiguous if most of the cast here was monogamous, but okay. Still, Travis's quest to find a cure for his daughter Jennifer, who had been magically aged back in #100, had come up short. While Jennifer seemed too old to stay awake or even move anymore, Travis was distraught. Meanwhile, in the nearby kingdom of P'thun, the wizard that gave Morgan the info at the start of his quest, Muldahara, uses a magic wand to murder the king and takes over. We mentioned Muldahara, possibly not by name, in an earlier post about the Quest, as "a lisping, scheming, effete fat ponce; that was (even) a little offensive back in 1985." I suppose they might have wanted to avoid just doing Deimos again, though. Tara had a spy in P'thun, though, who reports back; and Travis realizes there was something fishy about Muldahara: he had retrieved some mystic doodad for the wizard, to get the quest details, and perhaps felt responsible. He storms off, telling Tara he was in a bad mood and didn't want her to see it; leaving Tara wondering how much of that she was willing to put up with.

While being bathed in "costly unguents"--well, if that's your thing, I guess--Muldahara has a little flashback: he had seen a local demigod-statue-creature-thing give Jennifer the zap that aged her, then used Travis to get the gems that were the statue's eyes, and transferred those to his magic wand. So, the whole Quest was a red herring? I wonder if that was planned from the start. Travis finds the way to P'thun now has a massive hedge maze, but the magic ring he got in #114 and used to see through Desaad's illusions helps him, for about three seconds, until Muldahara sets a hedge monster on him. Then, yay, new subplot! Gotta be an improvement from the Mariah/Machiste one, right? That one wasn't awful, but maybe as repetitive as the Quest, while Mariah pined for Morgan like the whole way. This was the return of CIA spook/epic grudge holder Redmond, from Warlord Annual #5: after getting more information about the Mayans that emerged from the center of the earth, he realized that sounded like reports he had read about Dinosaur Island, from really old Suicide Squad stories, which is sorta uncharted but the general directions were there. Skartaris was originally a world inside of the earth, but was now more generally accepted as some extradimensional area, accessible from a few places. Like Dinosaur Island! Redmond hits a pterodactyl with his plane and goes down: I took a look at the covers, and I can't recall how long he would be chasing Travis. That plot was also a bit similar to one later with a guy named Maddox, who also hated Travis so much he followed him to another world, which is weird that it happened twice. Two final points: Redmond crash-landing his jet echoes Morgan crashing one in that annual, with even the dialog similar; and he was going to friggin' Dinosaur Island, yet seemed real surprised by that pterodactyl. What did you expect?

Anyway, the issue at hand: Travis realizes he can set the hedge monster on fire, and does. Even through he had a bad rep at the time, Travis still storms past the guards, to confront Muldahara, who is just giddy that he gets to kill Morgan up close. Using his wand, he ages Travis's sword to dust--that sword with the knuckle guard was pretty iconic!--and plays 'tag' with him, zapping him a couple years older repeatedly. Back in Shamballah, Jennifer senses her dad's danger, and teleports there: while frail, she was still "sorceress supreme," and destroys Muldahara's wand. A probably 90-year-old Travis clocks Muldahara, knocking him out; but then he and Jennifer revert to their true ages. So, not only was the whole quest thing pretty much for nothing (aside from dealing with the threats they found on the way in all the sidequests!) Jennifer ends up saving herself!

Meanwhile, a pretty blonde arrives in the city of thieves, Bandakhar. A pretty blonde with super-strength! It's Power Girl, who would hang out with Jennifer until #122. (The book would be refurbished a bit after that with new artists Jan Duursema and Tom Mandrake.) She had recently been established as Atlantean instead of Kryptonian, and somebody probably got handed the assignment of trying to make something of that. I know Power Girl has had some supporting casts since, but I wish Jennifer still got to hang: they were a good team, and Jennifer's classic green outfit is sharp as hell. 

Also this issue: yet another USPS Statement of Ownership. Number of copies sold closest to the filing date: 67,781. Ouch, we saw a Statement for #104, and that's down from 88,462!