A couple of weeks ago I was going back through the early posts of my project. My methodologies have evolved over the last (almost) year, so I wanted to update my database with the info from the project's early days. I came across a post from about 2 weeks in on the first appearance of Mike Grell's Travis Morgan from 1st Issue Special in which I raved about how much I enjoyed the comic. A few days later I happened to stumble across a huge lot of them in a couple of quarter bins, and here we are. I'm still missing the first 20 or so issues, but the stuff I've got is really cool.
This particular comic comes in a small run of issues that are stand alone adventures as Travis Morgan seeks to escape the tragedy that follows his last encounter with the demon priest Deimos. Grell is quite obviously channeling Well's The Time Machine here, but the spin he puts on the Morlocks/Eloi relationship is pretty cool. There's an argument to be made that the story is simply derivative of the Wells book, but I choose the think instead that Grell did this as an homage to a master of the genre. Science Fiction and Fantasy are closely related, not simply by their fandoms but by convention of their respective genres. Sometimes I think superhero fictions are the offspring of these two. Skataris, Grell's setting, has elements of both, so to pay a bit of tribute to one of the originary texts of the genre seems to me, at least, to make sense. We need to know where we've been to know where we're going.
I've read a few issues of the title so far, and one thing has struck me: no one wears much clothing. Now, the sun is always up in Skataris, making it a warm place, so the scant clothing makes sense. Occasionally you'll see a picture of someone where obviously the person is meant to be nude, but the comics censors said "No no no." What I really appreciate about Grell's depictions of the people in this world is that it's not just the women who are skimpily dressed. Here's Travis from the next issue:
That, right there, is one sexy Travis Morgan. Kudos, Mr. Grell.
Okay, more quarter bin treasures tomorrow.
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