SKULL THE SLAYER #2

"GODS AND SUPER GODS"
Writer/Editor: Marv Wolfman | Artist: Steve Gan
Letterer: San Jose | Colorist: Michele Wolfman

The Plot: Jim Scully is dragged by his caveman captor to a primitive camp, where he's thrown into a cave with the other plane survivors: Ann, Doctor Corey, and a young man named Jeff. Revealing his nickname of Skull, Scully leads the survivors in an escape from the cavemen. But when a herd of rampaging dinosaurs storms through the camp, Skull commandeers one and leads the beasts away. This earns him the respect of the cavemen, who lead the survivors into another cave. There, then find the skeletal remains of an alien in a futuristic chamber.

As Doctor Corey, Ann, and Jeff study alien writing on the wall, Skull decides to pilfer the alien corpse of its skull-buckled belt. He takes and dons the garment, but the alien skeleton crumbles to dust, causing the cavemen to attack. Skull holds them at bay and then joins the other survivors in fleeing to the jungle. They attempt to cross a river to escape the cavemen, but are attacked in the water by a Brontosaurus. Skull begins to glow and somehow subdues the dinosaur. The survivors all make it ashore, where Jeff points out that the glow is coming from Skull's stolen belt.

Continuity Notes: For some reason, the cover logo from issue 1 has already been replaced. The new logo will carry through the remainder of the series, though the issue 1 logo does appear on the title page of this issue (but then never shows up again). I don't know why it was changed, but I liked the first logo a lot better. Its primitive look gave more insight into what the series was about.

Page 1 provides a brief textual recap of all the events in the prior issue, with a few illustrations.

SKULL THE SLAYER #1

"THE COMING OF SKULL THE SLAYER!"
Stan Lee, publisher, presents the beginning of an epic by:
Creator/Writer/Colorist: Marv Wolfman | Artist: Steve Gan
Letterer: Pablo Marcos | Editor: Len Wein

The Plot: Vietnam veteran Jim Scully is aboard a military plane for extridition from Bermuda to the United States, where he is wanted for the murder of his brother. But en route to the U.S., the plane flies into a time/space warp in the Bermuda Triangle, then splits apart and crashes in an prehistoric world. Scully emerges from the front end of the plane, its sole survivor. Meanwhile a trio of additional passengers survives the rear segment's crash.

As Scully hunts for food, he is attacked by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Elsewhere, the other survivors are spotted by a group of primitive humans. Scully battles and eventually kills the T-Rex when he stabs it in the eye and sends it plummeting over a cliff. But as he recovers, he is struck in the head by a flung rock, and is surrounded by more primitive beings.

Continuity Notes: Our cast, at least as of issue 1, seems to consist of Jim Scully, and the three other survivors: a man called Doctor Corey, a woman named Ann, and a mostly-silent young man whose name is yet to be revealed.

Rather than recap Scully's backstory, I'll just mention that he was a special forces fighter dispatched to Vietnam and immediately captured, and then I'll let Marv Wolfman's ridiculous narration take it from there:

SKULL THE SLAYER

Back in my look at INVADERS #4, I called out a needless and convoluted plug for Marvel's SKULL THE SLAYER series. Then, in the comments to that post, I considered reading SKULL next after I finished with INVADERS. It is, after all, only an eight-issue series (plus a 2-part finale in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE), and I unboxed the trade paperback collection way back in 2015, but I've never touched it since. So, why not? I've long had a curiosity about this series. Three writers over the span of eight issues feels like a trainwreck in the making (and yet is somehow not at all surprising coming out of 1970s Marvel), but there's something about the series' premise -- a puply, "Doc Savage" type having adventures in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle -- that speaks to me.

At nine or ten weeks (I'm not sure yet if I'll do the TWO-IN-ONE issues separately or as one single post), this will take us up into mid-late September, and serve to wrap up a solid year-plus of seventies Marvel (INVADERS began last September, and SONS OF THE TIGER before that started in May). After that, we'll move into something non-Marvel for the autumn months, and then I've got something very, very big planned for the remainder of the year, into 2023 -- and probably even beyond.

Be here next week as Skull's adventures begin!

Available from Amazon.

CAPTAIN AMERICA #253 & #254

So, since we just wrapped up the entirety of the original INVADERS series last week, and since today happens to be Independence Day, the most patriotic holiday here in America, I figured I'd take advantage of the happy coincidence to dust off a couple of Captain America-themed posts from the early days of the blog which serve as a bit of a coda to the adventures of the Invaders.

In 1980/81, Roger Stern and John Byrne had an acclaimed and all-too-brief turn as the creative team on CAPTAIN AMERICA. And their final real story (not counting the retelling of Cap's origin they did an issue later) revisited the Invaders. I have to admit, it never really dawned on me how soon these issues came along after INVADERS ended! That series' final issue was cover-dated September of 1979, and this two-parter is from January and February of 1981. A mere fifteen months separated the conclusion of INVADERS and Stern's and Byrne's epilogue to the series!

(I suspect in part that's simply due to the fact that INVADERS feels like a Silver Age throwback to me. The artwork, the scripting style, even some of the plotting -- it's all incongruous with the Bronze Age that was in full swing alongside it. So even though I know when INVADERS was published, it feels like it was published about a decade earlier.)

So, without further ado, here are two posts that originally went up eight years ago, showing us whatever happened to the greatest heroes of World War II:

CAPTAIN AMERICA #253
CAPTAIN AMERICA #254

Okay, I actually do have one final bit of ado: I didn't reference it in the continuity notes for CAP 253, but you'll see it in a screenshot there: Jacqueline Falsworth (-Chrichton) mentions that her brother, Brian -- a.k.a. the Union Jack we just spent several weeks reading about -- died off-panel in a car accident after the war. Kind of an inauspicious end! Mind you, it makes sense that Stern and Byrne wanted the second U.J. off the table to tell their story of the mantle being passed. And yeah, it does add a bit of unfortunate realism to the proceedings -- not every hero goes out in a blaze of glory. But it still feels like a waste to see the character done away with via an offhanded remark like that.

See you in a week, when I reveal what's next on the schedule! (Though if you were reading the earliest INVADERS reviews last year, I already spoiled way back then.)