Review- THE WARLORD: THE SAGA

THE WARLORD: THE SAGA (DC, 2010; Softcover)

Collects Warlord Nos. 1-6 (cover dates June- November, 2009)

Writer: Mike Grell

Artists: Pencilers- Joe Prado and Chad Hardin; Inkers- Walden Wong, Jay Leisten, Joe Prado, Wayne Faucher, and Dan Green

Colorist: David Curiel

Now this is what I'm talking about! High flying sword and sorcery medieval action meets ancient advanced high tech Atlantean civilization...under the Earth's crust in Tibet. A group of explorers in then-modern day 2009 discover a fresh dinosaur corpse and stumble upon the hidden world of Skartaris, a land where dinosaurs meet science fiction at the center of the Earth. This group of folks, all with their own agendas, return and go exploring and things go awry. Enter the Warlord! The action is every bit as over the top as it was in the original series, back when the violence pushed the limits of the Comics Code Authority. 

Mike Grell's Warlord is woefully underrepresented in terms of collected editions, with this book being only one of three ever published. The first is a long out of print collection of the first ten or twelve issues, the second is an out of print Showcase phone book (I have stumbled across copies on comic shop shelves here and there, so they are floating around), and then there is this book. 

While creator Mike Grell handles the writing and issue covers, others handle the interior art on these issues. I adored Grell's work on the original series, and was thrilled to see that he picked up his pencils for the interior artwork of the subsequent issues. Then I became frustrated when I realized that the rest of the series was never collected in trade paperback. I hope that this becomes rectified at some point in the future, as I would love to read issues 7-16 but have no interest in hunting down the back issues. I hope that DC releases another trade paperback or two. Better yet, go back to the beginning and do Warlord Archives.

Junk Food For Thought rating: 4 out of 5.

The OCD zone- I can't stand how the covers are all collected in the back of the book, with no chapter break indication of any kind. I guess the mythological mainstream bookstore buyer that DC chases was fooled into thinking that this was a “graphic novel” and not a compilation of comic books previously published in the single issue periodical format.

DVD-style Extras included in this book: No extras to be had, really. No variants. No harm, no foul.

Paper rating: 4 out of 5. Decent weight coated stock with a slight sheen.

Binding rating: 4 out of 5. Standard glued binding.

Cardstock cover coating rating: 5 out of 5. Nice thick waxy lamination on the cardstock cover.

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