“The game of life’s about us all…wherever we are or wherever we’re from.” Jinnrise, my comic book series published by IDW Publishing, was inspired by this mantra and line from issue #1. The best of stories, those that resonate throughout the ages, start with the seeds of a theme.

Informed by the writer’s passions and experiences, the essence of the story springs forth. Such was the case for me.

Growing up in a mixed heritage household, I found myself drawn to novels, comics, and films that celebrated our common humanity. Fears, hopes, nightmares, and dreams: the ties that bind were what fascinated me the most. The outer trappings and vehicles of storytelling? In the short term, they didn’t really matter.

As I became a more discerning fan of genre entertainment, I grew less and less excited about the tentpole projects being announced year after year. Conventions like San Diego Comic-Com were no longer celebrations, but yearly commentaries on the growing stagnancy in science fiction and fantasy.

How many stories with zombies, vampires, robots, and wizards could one enjoy without being overwhelmed by déjà vu?

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Right off the bat (no pun intended), the cover tips us off that this issue will feature the blood-sucking undead!

In the eerie blue glow of the full moon, a vampire swoops down on sword-drawn Arak like a bomber lugging twin torpedoes. And, oh dear, those sharp fangs aren’t the only pair of pointy objects poised to pierce Arak or poke his eyes out. (Yeah, they’re hard to miss, framed as they are by the yellow moon.)

[Okay, the adolescent male has been sent back to his room in my psyche; now let’s summarize this issue with less juvenile eyes, shall we?]

We don’t get to any vampires until 19 pages in; this issue fits a recurring pattern of narrative structure that reserves the monster-of-the-month for the last five pages or so, while the first four-fifths of the issue covers court intrigue and character development that furthers the overarching plot.

Arak returns from being demon-flung out of the sorceress Angelica’s tent the night before, arriving at Carolus Magnus’s jousting tournament just in time to reveal to the Twelve Peers that Angelica’s brother Argalia cheated by using sorcery when he defeated the champion Rinaldo last ish. Also, by the way, her demons have carted off one of the Twelve, the court magician Malagigi, to White Cathay.

Most of the Twelve (well, they’re down to ten now, since one seat has been mysteriously empty and, of course, poor old Malagigi is a hostage to goat-footed devils) dismiss the charges of the “savage heathen,” since it is his word against Angelica and Argalia, who are both nobility and allegedly Christian.

The ensuing exchange rather amusingly ticks off Arak, who lays out a good case of circumstantial evidence and shows himself to be smarter than just about all the rest of them combined. Even Valda, usually stoically silent, intervenes, telling the rest of her Peers that they should heed the words of Arak.

All this gets her is a snickering remark from the Bishop: “Well, now! It seems rave Valda is smitten with the young savage!” Another one chimes in, “Perhaps we should call her the ‘Iron Maiden’ no more, eh?” Nudge nudge wink wink. Man, and you thought I was juvenile! These guys need a serious come-uppance.

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Our adventures with Arak the Viking-Native-American continue!

Before I summarize issue 3, I haven’t said anything much about the artwork yet, so I’ll do my best to opine on that a bit. I don’t have a particularly deep background in visual art, other than that I’ve been looking at it all my life (and occasionally drawing a cartoon or illustration here and there), so I speak strictly as a layperson on this. That said, here are my general impressions.

First, the elephant in the room: To younger eyes that grew up on the computer-enhanced visuals of the past decade or so, these old pre-‘90s comics must look terribly quaint. Take a representative comic off the stand today. The colors and depth and lighting effects, the impression of characters leaping right out of the 2-dimensional bounds of the page from explosions that look like they could burn your fingers: such is to be seen in any typical issue of a mainstream comic like X-Factor (which is produced twice monthly!)

So, right off the bat, a typical early ‘80s comic like Arak appears, by comparison, pretty flat, the colors dim and washed-out, with a limited palette of hues and rather pedestrian panel lay-out with few or no “effects.” Older comics look much like their ancestral progenitor: the old newspaper comic-strip or “funnies” pages, because that is essentially what they were, printed with the same technology on the same type of thin pulp paper.

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See that nine-year-old boy spinning the revolving comic-book rack, seeking out the most lurid covers of monsters and aliens and skeletons in battle fatigues. He’ll rifle through his pocket for some quarters to buy the latest issue of Weird War Tales or House of Mystery or Arak, Son of Thunder.

See that forty-year-old man picking up a thirty-year-old issue of Arak, Son of Thunder, its cheap newsprint pages now yellowing, the staples loose, an older but still potent artifact promising strange adventures and magical mayhem in dreamed-of faraway lands.  This relic of boyhood — the feel of the thin paper; the primitive, splotchy look of the four-color panels; even the smell of it — brings back inchoate memories and associations of a simpler, more carefree time when his future was expanding, not shrinking, when everything was out there to be gotten, not closing in to get him.

Something as simple as a comic book can be the bridge between the boy and the man, reminding him that he is still the same being, the same conscious self who lived those years and is living these years and lived all the years in between. It is why, even though he doesn’t collect Star Wars figures, he’d love to hold again a 1978 Kenner Snaggletooth (that little guy from the Mos Eisley Cantina), because he can remember the feel of it in his hands, out in the sandbox at recess, when it was one of the most prized possessions in the world (along with Walrus and Hammerhead).

These, then, are our totems, and the old comics our sacred books.

So let’s get to the second installment of Arak, Son of Thunder, shall we?

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In the summer of 1981, DC Comics proudly presented “the coming of a great new hero who stalks the fear-haunted shadows of an age of darkness” — Arak, Son of Thunder!

Arak was brought to life by Roy Thomas, who’d cut his sword-and-sorcery eyeteeth launching the most successful S&S comic-book franchise ever over at Marvel (the line of Conan titles), and penciler Ernie Colon. It had all the earmarks of such titles — swashbuckling action, magic, monsters, and mayhem — but Arak was not just another generic brute barbarian among the sundry pale imitations of Robert E. Howard’s iconic character. No, Thomas seems to have had bigger ambitions for this epic tale, both in its historical moorings and its complexity.

Thomas uses the back page, the one later reserved for a letters column, to explain what he was up to, in an editorial entitled “A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WORLD, DC-STYLE!”

The editorial begins with the observation “They called them the DARK AGES — but we hope to make them blaze with the light of adventure and heroism.”

What follows that intriguing lead line is a brief history lesson of the “latter half of the first millennium A.D.,” during which this series is set. Of course, Howard himself used a quasi-historical background for his famous barbarian, but the “Hyborian Age” was set so far in the shadowy past that he had a good deal of leeway. By conceiving his story as historical fantasy set in a more recent era, Thomas does create more work for himself, although, granted, there probably weren’t too many medieval historians who would be reading the comic and calling him out (I certainly wouldn’t know if he got some minor detail wrong about the court of the king of the Franks).

Where his leeway lies — and where he really gets to have fun and play — is in the fact that he clearly defines this as alternate history, predicated on this premise: “Ah, but what if there were another earth somewhere — a parallel planet, existing but a heartbeat away from our world yet forever separated from it — an earth on which events and names and geography were much like our own, but with one all-important difference: What if, on that world…MAGIC WORKED?”

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As I embark on a close reading of the complete 50-issue run of ARAK, Son of Thunder, I believe an introductory post is justified, wherein I try to rationalize why I would want to do such a thing. Why Arak? Why now? Why me? (And, for some of you: Who the heck is Arak?)

First, a series of snapshots. These will get at the “Why me?” part, I think:

* I am lying in a hammock outside my grandparents’ cabin, nestled in the ponderosa pine forest on the Mogollon Rim of Arizona…White clouds skim across a blue sky, so close you can almost reach up and touch them… The smell in my nose is pine mixed with the crisp scent of newsprint, courtesy of a Marvel Comics Star Wars and a DC House of Mysteries.

** I am curled up on the top bunk of my bunk bed (bunk beds rocked! — they were like having a tree-house/fort in your own bedroom), home sick from school. My dad (Happy Father’s Day, Dad!) walks in bringing the latest bounty from the mailbox: the new G.I. Joe comic. I eagerly rip off the plastic bag, anxious with bated breath to find out if Snake Eyes escaped the exploding bunker at the end of last month’s issue.

*** I am pedaling my bicycle down to the local gas station, eager to check the revolving display stand to see if the new installment of ROM or Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew has hit the stand (and, damn, I was in good shape back then, pedaling hither and yon. It was all downhill once I got my driver’s license).

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