Skull the Slayer

Skull the Slayer was a short-lived series from Marvel Comics that ran for just 8 issues, cover-dated August 1975 to November 1976. That was a time when I was buying at least half a dozen Marvel titles a month, but not this one – in fact I don’t even remember being aware of its existence. It’s a fascinating concept, though, combining two of the most popular Fortean themes of the seventies – the Bermuda Triangle and Ancient Aliens.

I bought the six comics pictured above at the London Super Comic Convention earlier this month. I mentioned the two Silver Age bargains I picked up, for just £2 each, in my post about Jack Kirby’s Universe. These Bronze Age oddities came from the same stall and were a mere £1 each – unbagged, but all in excellent, scarcely handled condition. They didn’t have issues 1 or 4, but I got the rest of the series. The final issue, #8 in the bottom right-hand corner, even has a cover by Jack Kirby. That’s one of the two covers that still work well at thumbnail size – the other being #6 in the bottom left corner, which is by far my favourite of the six covers (I’ll come back to it at the end of the post).

Whatever image the title “Skull the Slayer” conjures up in your mind, the actuality is a lot wackier than that. Having flown through a vortex in the Bermuda Triangle, the four protagonists find themselves transported into the distant past, where ancient aliens have built a huge tower-like construct that pulls in creatures from all different stages of Earth’s history (meaning you can have dinosaurs and cavemen in the same story, for example, which is always a good thing). It isn’t clear why the aliens did this (not to me, anyway), but by the time the action takes place there’s only one of them left, living in this tower and watching robot versions of King Arthur’s knights fight endless battles with the sorceress Morgan-le-Fay. This occurs about half-way through the series, and marks the high-point of the daftness curve – the earlier and later issues are a lot better.

There are a couple of references to the historic Bermuda Triangle. In issue 3, as the protagonists approach the Time Tower, they come across the skeletal remains of dozens of airmen and sailors who presumably vanished inside the triangle at various times in history. Then in the final two issues they encounter a U.S. Navy pilot, Captain Victor Cochran, who was sent out to search for Flight 19 in 1945 (the original flight of five torpedo-bombers which started the Bermuda Triangle mystery – see my post about The Mystery of Flight 19). After passing through the time vortex, Cochran was found by a tribe of Inca warriors who have worshipped him as a God ever since.

The four main characters are an interesting mix of 70s stereotypes: an ex-soldier, an egghead scientist, an outspoken feminist and a long-haired teenager. “Skull the Slayer” is the nickname of Jim Scully, a Vietnam vet who spent five years in a prisoner-of-war camp. He may have been a nice guy once, but the war left him resentful and untrusting – the perfect seventies anti-hero. He’s constantly squabbling with the war-hating, establishment-hating scientist, Dr Corey. The latter’s assistant, Ann, is one of those feminists of the blonde-haired, large-breasted, scantily-clad, grenade-throwing variety that particularly appeals to adolescent male comic book readers (and probably never existed in reality).

The least interesting character is Jeff, the teenage boy. Presumably he was meant to be a surrogate for the reader, but he hardly does or says anything, and has no discernable personality. I can’t help feeling the writers should have gone a step further and made him a real comic book geek, saying things like “Whoa, cool, dude” every time a T. Rex or barbarian warrior makes an appearance! As for the bearded, middle-aged, mega-brained scientist – I’d hoped he would be someone I could relate to myself, but the guy is a total jerk. At the end of #3, for example, he leaves his colleagues facing almost certain death in the Time Tower so he can run off and explore some its more fascinating technology (OK, that probably is what I’d do, come to think of it).

Coming back to that great cover in the bottom-left of my photo (which is by Conan artist John Buscema) – the creature Scully is grappling with is meant to be an ichthyosaur, a ferocious marine reptile of the Jurassic period. Now it just so happens that I may have had an encounter with one of these creatures myself earlier this month. I spent a day fossil-hunting at Lyme Regis with Paul Jackson and his wife Melanie, and among other finds Paul picked up the object shown in the photo below (it’s sitting on the cover of a pocket-sized booklet, so you can see how tiny it is). I’m not sure, but I think this might be a tail-end vertebra from a baby ichthyosaur – which isn’t as unlikely as it sounds, because such things are quite often found as pebbles on that particular stretch of beach.