SKULL THE SLAYER #4

"TIME OUT OF MIND!"
Together again for the fourth time!
Author: Steve Englehart | Artists: Sal Buscema & Mike Esposito
Letterer: Irving Watanabe | Colorist: Don Warfield | Editor: Marv Wolfman

The Plot: In ancient Egypt, Skull and Doctor Corey battle the Pharaoh's soldiers, determining during the fight that the men are robots -- but the heroes are overwhelmed and captured. They are brought before the Phaoaoh himself, an extraterrestrial named Slitherogue, who explains that the "Tower of Time" is a creation of his people in preparation for conquering all of Earth's historical eras. Then, to demonstrate his power, Slitehrogue kills Jeff.

Skull, Corey, and Ann spend the night in a cell, and the next morning are sent to work building the pyramids, under the watch of Slitherogue's robots. When Skull sees an opening for escape, he, Ann, and Corey race off into the desert. But Ann falls and breaks her leg. Skull declares that she must be left behind, but Corey stays to defend her. Corey and Ann are both killed, while Skull tumbles into the time portal, falling to a new level. He emerges in the quarters of Merlin the wizard and the Black Knight. After a brief skirmish with Black Knight, Skull agrees to work with Merlin to overthrow Slitherogue.

Meanwhile, Morgan Le Fay summons Slitherogue and asks his help in slaying her enemies, Merlin and King Arthur. Sensing that Skull is in this time as well, Slitherogue agrees to aid her.

Continuity Notes: As described above, the entire supporting cast is killed off here, leaving Skull the only survivor. In the early pages, Jeff has much longer hair than in any of the prior issues. I assume Sal Buscema just didn't get proper reference for him or something.

I'll let Slitherogue describe what his deal is:

So based on that, it seems that every timeframe in the Tower of Time is filled with robots, and not real people or creatures. I'm not sure if this was Marv Wolfman's original intention, but he was clearly going toward something at least a bit similar, as he had already revealed a robot dinosaur last issue. This also means that the "return of the Black Knight" blurbed on the cover isn't really true -- this is a robot version of Marvel's 1950s medeival hero; not the real thing.

My Thoughts: So -- I wasn't expecting that. When the prior issue stated that we would see "a new direction," I just figured the story would take a deviation from wherever Marv Wolfman had been sending it. And while it's true that it does (I think Wolfman had genuinely intended the Tower of Time to be a portal to different eras and not some kind of "scale model" of them), Steve Englehart walking in with hatchet in hand and a bloodthirtly glint in his eye is a bit of a surprise -- and not a welcome one.

Look, I can't say I became attached to Corey, Ann, and Jeff after a mere three issues (and honestly, I didn't really care either way when Jeff was offed early in the issue; he was such a non-entity from the start), but I don't like the idea of a new writer dumping them all so unceremoniously in his very first issue. It actually reminds me of something which would happen about twenty years later, when Warren Ellis took over from John Francis Moore as the writer of Marvel's DOOM 2099 series. Ellis came aboard and immediately killed off all of Moore's supporting characters in his first issue. It was even more egregious there due to the fact that the series had been running for a while and the cast was established. It really bothered me then (and I was happy when Ellis left the title, Moore came back, and "resurrected" all his dead characters), and it bugs me just as much here.

Mind you, I don't begrudge a writer for wanting to take things in a new direction, and sometimes that involves jettisoning characters in which the writer has no interest. But to off them all, basically at once, makes that lack of interest blatantly obvious. I'm sure there were ways Englehart could've disposed of Ann, Jeff, and Corey over the course of a few issues, and not necessarily with definitive deaths for all three. But of course, this is Englehart's only issue of SKULL, suggesting that perhaps it's not just the characters he was uninterested in, but the very concept itself -- which begs the question of why he took the assignment in the first place!

Anyway, series creator Wolfman edited the issue, so on some level he must have been okay with Englehart's bloody deck-clearing, even if I'm not okay with it nearly forty years later. Next issue, Skull's third (and final) writer comes aboard to see us through to the end. (And by the way, I'm fully aware this could be undone by the incoming Bill Mantlo, but it certainly doesn't read as if Englehart plans it to be anything other than permanent as of this installment. I guess we'll find out what happens soon enough, though.)