SKULL THE SLAYER #7

"BURY MY HEART IN THE CITY OF GOLD"
Writer: Bill Mantlo | Artists: Sal Buscema & Sonny Trinidad
Letterer: Karen Mantlo | Colorist: Petra Goldberg | Editor: Archie Goodwin

The Plot: Skull, Ann, Jeff, and Doctor Corey are esorted by the Incas to their city of gold, where the High Priest, leader of the group's captors, presents them to their king. Meanwhile, in the United States, Senator "Stonewall" Turner meets with Freddy Lancer about Lancer's plan to head into the Bermuda Triangle and find Skull.

Skull and friends are dropped into two separate pits, where they find themselves up against hungry dinosaurs. In one pit, Ann, Corey, and Jeff fight two pterodactyls, while Skull battles a stegosaurus in the other. Ann stabs one pterosaur with a spear while Jeff shoots at it. When Skull's energy belt begins to glow, the High Priest turns on his king and throws the monarch into the pit with Skull. Nonetheless, Skull's strength belt allows him to kill the stegosaur. Meanwhile, Ann finds some grenades on a soldier's corpse and hurls one at the remaining pterodactyl, killing it.

In the aftermath of the fight, Doctor Corey captures the treacherous High Priest, while the king unmasks himself as one Captain Victor Cochran of the United States Navy, who has been trapped among the Incas for thirty years.

Continuity Notes: The Incas reveal a proficiency for English, leading Doctor Corey to speculate that, due to the nonlinear nature of time within the Bermuda Triangle, it's possible someone from the modern world appeared among them at some point and taught them the language. The final page reveal of Captain Cochran seems to confirm this utterly random theory.

Speaking of nonlinear time: Skull notes that it's only been "a few days" since he found the strength belt in issue 3, but the scenes set in the real world state that Lancer has been hanging around with Senator Turner for much longer than that (specifically a month) -- long enough for Lancer to have been discharged from the army, to have hired a few mercenaries via ads placed in gun magazines, and to have used Turner's resources to acquire three surplus jet fighters for his mission to find Skull!

Lancer also suddenly has a pretty eye-rollingly bad Southern accent which was not present when he spoke last issue (or in issue 1).

There are several Vietnam flashbacks in this issue, as Skull compares his fall into the stegosaur pit with his airdrop into the Southeast Asian jungles, and then later when Lancer reveals that he and Skull were POWs together, and that Lancer betrayed Skull to the Viet Cong in order to secure his own release.

At one point Ann reminds Skull (and readers) that Skull abandoned all his allies in issue 4.

My Thoughts: This issue engages in the time-honored comic book tradition of treading water, as the narrative barely moves an inch between the first and final pages. In between Skull and friends reaching the Inca city and the reveal of Captain Cochan, we have several interminable pages of our heroes fighting dinosaurs, while the only items of interest occur far away, in the offices of Senator Turner. I can't imagine why Mantlo felt it was a good idea to present his story this way. The king should have unmasked himself very early on, the dinosaur fights should've lasted no more than two pages, and the story should advanced at least somewhat. But I suspect Mantlo wants to get Lancer and his mercenaries into the Bermuda Triangle, and he's simply killing time for Skull and the others until he can reach that point.

The only problem -- and Mantlo probably didn't know it when he wrote this installment -- is that SKULL THE SLAYER is on the cusp of cancellation! Next issue will be the series' finale, and I strongly suspect we aren't going to see the Lancer material go anywhere. Hopefully Mantlo will at least get to wrap up whatever he has planned for Captain Cochran, but even that might be too much to hope for at this point.

Overall, a disappointing issue, and I can't say I would've had high hopes for upcoming installments even if SKULL hadn't been cancelled. Marv Wolfman (who, you'll notice, is no longer even editing the series, as he had moved on from his position as Marvel's editor-in-chief by this point) clearly introduced the Tower of Time to be a major -- even central -- component of the series' narrative. But Mantlo, for reasons humanity may never understand, decided that the most interesting element of Wolfman's story should be very quickly discarded, turning the series back into a generic "Lost World" pastiche -- and heck, if that's all Mantlo wanted to write, Marvel already had Ka-Zar for that sort of thing. (And the fact that Ka-Zar had a self-titled series canceled just two years earlier after a mere five issues should probably have been a clue that readers might not have been interested in such material at the time!)

So it's probably best SKULL is ending, becuse I doubt I would've stuck around much longer.