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| SKULL THE SLAYER No. 1, August 1975 |
It is somewhat easy to understand why it took
creator/writer and colorist Marv Wolfman four years to sell the basic notion of
this comic book “to someone… anyone.” For despite the support of “Rascally” Roy
Thomas, another “dinosaur buff”, and a determination to have the title sell
“month after month”, the rudimentary storyline to Issue One of “Skull The
Slayer” is still arguably little more than the unoriginal tale of a group of Bermuda-bound
passengers somehow crash-landing back in time to the Jurassic period.
However, whereas the two-time Jack Kirby Award-winner originally
envisaged thrusting “an entire mid-town Manhatten office building into a
Prehistoric setting”, “The Coming Of Skull The Slayer!” published storyline contains
a rather more intriguing, compelling narrative. Something which perfectly
demonstrates Wolfman’s belief that the eighteen-page adventure “was worth the
wait” as his “ideas matured, some concepts grew, some changed” and “all hopefully
improved.”
Much of this early success is down to the Shazam
Award-winner's creation of James Patrick Scully, a disillusioned Vietnam veteran
who has been wrongfully arrested for the murder of his drug-addicted brother.
Indeed the vast majority of this “book that would make you go Arrgh!” focuses
solely upon the titular character, and provides Skull with an especially edgy
backstory which not only provides an explanation as to why he would attempt to
unbelievably overpower a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a decidedly thin-looking spear
and a large rock. But also why the trained fighter would so readily try and
adapt to the life of a hunter-gatherer; “Sergeant Scully of the dinosaur patrol
reportin’ in, sir.”
Interestingly though, despite his ability to ‘acclimatise’
to his surroundings, wrestling a bovine-like mammal to the ground in the
process, Wolfman’s “star” is actually quite the anti-hero and repeatedly
demonstrates his mantra of putting himself first by battering his military
escort as their plane breaks apart in the sky and failing to search for any
other survivors because ‘he’s tabbed enough charred corpses in his five years’. The “bright boy”
even demonstrates some mental instability by bursting into hysterical “insane
cackling laughter” on a couple of occasions when his dire lonely situation
strikes home and he realises “he’s totally out of his league.”
Unfortunately the Brooklyn-born writer’s overly-used and
jargon-filled narration isn’t anywhere near as engaging as his creation. Indeed
the New Yorker’s nasty habit of explaining everything in some sort of
‘Seventies jive talk’ becomes infuriatingly off-putting extremely quickly and
ruins not only the intensity of an arguably contentious backstory. But also the
drama of Scully’s perilous primordial predicament.
Possibly the highlight of this Bronze Age bi-monthly though
is artist Steve Gan’s wonderfully drawn ‘great giant reptiles’. The Star-Lord
co-creator really conveys a sense of scale and bestial dynamism to the primeval
world’s carnivorous inhabitants, especially that of the tyrant lizard as it
hunts Scully through the undergrowth. As a result it is very clear why Wolfman
would state within the comic’s editorial “Old Funny Animals” that “when the
final art came in, I finally let out my sigh” as “Steve Gan had done a
fantastic job.”
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| Creator/Writer/Colorist: Marv Wolfman, Artist: Steve Gan, and Letterer: Pablo Marcos |
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