SKULL THE SLAYER #3

"TUMULT IN THE TOWER OF TIME!"
Writer/Editor: Marv Wolfman | Pencils: Steve Gan
Inkers: Pablo Marcos & Steve Gan
Letters: Irv Watanabe | Colors: Michele Wolfman

The Plot: Skull wrestles with a prehistoric beast until it bucks him off, after which he, Ann, Jeff, and Doctor Corey continue their exploration of the prehistoric world. After being nearly trampled by a herd of stampeding dinosaurs, Skull leads the group to see what spooked the animals. They come across a field of skeletal remains tied to posts. From there, they move on to a huge tower, which offers glimpses of various time periods -- a different one on each level.

As they gaze into the tower, the group is attacked by a T-Rex. Skull and Jeff fight the creature, while Corey slips away. Skull figure out that the Tyrannosaur is a robot, and destroys it. Then the group hears Corey scream. They follow him and find that he has stumbled into ancient Egypt, where he's been captured by a Pharaoh's soldiers.

Continuity Notes: Not many in this issue, though it should be noted that Skull's corpse-robbing ways have evidently rubbed off on Ann and Jeff. At Ann's suggestion, all three of them pilfer clothing from the skeletons near the tower. Doctor Corey, however, remains in his normal clothes.

As for the skeletons themselves -- they're from a number of different time periods, and there are extraterrestrials among them (and it is from the alien-but-humanoid bodies that our heroes procure their new cothes). Later, when the group finds the tower, Jeff notes that it is covered in alien writing identical to that which was in the cave where the primitive humans worshipped an alien corpse.

My Thoughts: As of this issue, Marv Wolfman drastically, drastically pulls back on his third-person captions, and suddenly the comic is readable! There's only the sparsest use of such narrative boxes here, just enough to move the story along (and yes, one of them does casually refer to Skull in the first person as "man", but compared with the previous two issues, that's nothing). If Wolfman had written the series this way from the beginning, I would've liked it a lot more! Further, he moves the story along nicely here, revealing his explanation of the "mystery" of the Bermuda Triangle, and it's pretty cool.

The weird thing is, I wonder if Wolfman himself perhaps realized that SKULL wasn't really clicking as he might have hoped. I mean, he created the series so it should be his "baby" -- but as you'll see below, the "next issue" caption says that we're about to see "A new writer! A new approach!" next month. So Wolfman either got bored with his creation in a hurry, or forced himself to admit that maybe he wasn't the right fit for what he'd created (or that what he'd created wasn't the right fit for what Marvel wanted).

It should be noted that whatever happened, this doesn't seem to be a case of Wolfman leaving against his will, as he has set things up for the incoming writer and he will remain as the series' editor. It's a little sad though, because with his scripting deficiencies corrected, I suddenly find this a much more interesting read, and I'm a little sad to see him go -- and to see the series change direction, to whatever extent that's going to happen.

In any case, don't get too excited for that "new writer". Steve Englehart will indeed come aboard next time, bringing frequent collaborator Sal Buscema with him on art, but Englehart will write a whopping one issue of SKULL before handing the series off to its third (and ultimately final) writer, Bill Mantlo. So I hope you guys are ready for a little creative roller coaster, because it starts next week!