The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 1350: Dragon #1, August 1987

I don't think I have any issues of Comics Interview, the news magazine that is also publisher of today's comic. These sorts of news publications aren't very popular anymore, a casualty of the Internet, I'm afraid. But I'm not sure that the replacements, such sites as Comic Book Resources or Bleeding Cool, have the same sort of feel that Comics Interview, or even the in house vehicles like Marvel Age or Malibu Sun, had. There was something more personal and imminent to these publications. I used to love reading Marvel Age each month to get an idea of what was going on in the corners of the Marvel U that I didn't follow.

I do like that those behind this news magazine also decided to try their hands at comics. It's one thing I've always been a bit embarrassed about, that I talk and talk and talk about comics, but don't actually make them. I have begun, recently, to try some sequential storytelling, which I'm sure will make its way onto Sad Monster Comics, but they're certainly not at the level that today's comic is.

I don't know any of the background of this piece. The title character is a member of a superhero team called The Southern Knights. As far as I can tell, they're a super-team based in the Southern US, a part of the country famously lacking in these kinds of characters. Though, given the tenor of the Southern states sometimes, it's easy to see why one might avoid this area as a setting for a series. There are numerous leftover problems, even now, from the era of slavery, and if one sets a series in an area where this is a concern (as, sadly, it still appears to be), then you really can't ignore it. Such a setting, for me at least, would always have an elephant in the room, so to speak.

But that's neither here nor there for Dragon. This is the tale (tail?) of the last dragons, two of them travelling the world with each other. Dragon, or Mark Dagon, recounts some of his past adventures, even as he travels through the same area, 800 years later. A pretty good comic, and I think I'll finish off the series shortly.

More to come...