SKULL THE SLAYER #6

"SWAMP!"
Writer: Bill Mantlo | Artists: Sal Buscema & Steve Gan
Letterer: Karen Mantlo | Colorist: Petra Goldberg | Editor: Marv Wolfman

The Plot: Outside the Tower of Time, as Ann and Jeff watch, Skull removes an arrow from Doctor Corey's arm and does his best to treat the wound -- then the group moves along, Skull carrying the unconscious Corey. Inside the Tower, the Black Knight confronts and kills Slitherogue, but when the alien dies, the Tower collapses. Meanwhile, a survivor of the plane crash, Corporal Freddy Lancer, is found by a passing Navy ship. Aboard, Lancer meets with Jeff's father, Senator "Stoneface" Turner, and vows to find Skull.

Back on the island, Skull and company find the tail end of the crashed plane and gather supplies from within. Soon after, as they float down a river on a makeshift raft, they're attacked by a group of Inca warriors. But when a prehistoric ichthyosaur appears and begins devouring fallen Incas, Skull leaps atop the creature and stabs it repeatedly, his strength belt putting so much force behind his assault that the ichthyosaur explodes.

In the aftermath, as Ann embraces Skull, the Incas begin to chant -- words Corey translates as them calling Skull the "Son of the Sun" and beckoning him to follow them through the swap. Their leader points at a huge golden structure in the distance which Skull believes to be the legendary lost city of El Dorado.

Continuity Notes: As he trudges through the swamp, Skull recalls his special forces training in the Florida Everglades, where he was paired with a jerk of a fellow soldier named Freddy Lancer. As noted above, Lancer is found by Jeff's father in this issue, and seems to be planning a trip into the Bermuda Triangle to confront Skull. A quick flip back in the trade paperback reveals that there was a soldier named Freddy escorting Skull in issue 1. He was the target of nonstop heckling by Skull, back when Marv Wolfman presented the protagonist as an unhinged jerk. As Bill Mantlo has considerably rehabilitated Skull from that original portrayal, the flashback here serves to explain why we readers should dislike Lancer.

Part of the flashback also suggests that Skull's wife, Pam, was a serial philanderer, messing around with any number of Skull's fellow soldiers. This seems a bit ad odds with Wolfman's first issue as well, where there it was simply presented as if she had moved on during the five years Skull was a POW.

Lancer describes the plane crash in issue 1, stating that he saw dinosaurs on the Bermuda island before the plane tore in two and sent him flying into the water.

When Doctor Corey comes around, he and Skull appear to finally bury their long-running feud.

Though there are multiple flashbacks and references to past events in this issue, there is but one footnote, as Jeff recalls Skull finding the alien strength belt in issue 2.

My Thoughts: There seems to be some confusion here regarding the Tower of Time; though I'm not sure whether it's due to confused writing on Wolfman's part early on, a confused understanding of what Wolfman intended on the part of Bill Mantlo, or a misinterpretation of my part as to what Wolfman had originally showed us. To wit, in issue 3, Wolfman revealed that our heroes were fighting robot dinosaurs, and then had them discover the Tower of Time. When they got close to it, Steve Gan's artwork clearly appeared to depict them standing on one level of a multi-level structure, and they could look up or down to see levels above and below them, where different historical eras existed.

My takeaway, as subsequently suggested by Steve Englehart via Slitherogue in issue 4, was that the Tower was a confined structure, and the entire prehistoric setting where Skull and friends had been hanging out over the previous three installments was inside of it. We hadn't yet seen the "real" outside of the Tower; only a sort of abstraction which existed within it, on every level, to allow people inside to see the other levels and to help them understand what was going on. If Skull and friends really were on a prehistoric island with the Tower built upon its soil, why would there be robot dinosaurs running around there? That said, this doesn't explain how their plane crashed inside the Tower, but I figured that would somehow be eventually explained.

But at no point did I think there was an actual island inside the Bermuda Triangle with real dinosaurs running around on it (or at least, at no point after the introduction of the Tower explained that possibility away). Yet this seems to be exactly what Bill Mantlo believes: inside the Bermuda Triangle is an island upon which reside dinosaurs, cavemen, Incas (!), and who knows what else, and on that island, Slitherogue's people built a tower designed to recreate every era in the history of planet Earth. This just seems weird to me; like you've taken a strange, unreal location and piggybacked a second strange, unreal location right on top of it. It's overkill and makes no sense (to the extent any of this makes sense).

But like I said, maybe I'm wrong and Mantlo is right. Certainly, Marv Wolfman, in his capacity as editor, probably would've corrected Mantlo if he had misinterpreted the Tower. But then, I'm not actually certain Wolfman is paying any attention to the series at this point. Aside from making sure the writers and artist hit deadlines, I feel like his interest in the story itself has waned to the point of nonexistence. I can't really say why I get this impression, other than that it feels like everyone is running around, doing whatever they want, whether or not any of it makes sense with prior installments.

So the bottom line is that Slitherogue is dead (killed off quite unceremoniously for someone with the amount of power he demonstrated over the past two issues), the promise of the Tower of Time is squandered, but we're still somehow in the prehistoric world -- only now there are Incas in it. I can't wait (?) to see where this utterly insane series goes next.