I was making my occasional visit to Facebook the other day when a new post by Lloyd Smith caught my eye.* Like myself, Lloyd is a stalwart fan of the ‘Bronze Age’ era of comics, so I keep track of his output. This is what his post said:

"The DAILY SPLASH for December 11! Today's splash page is by Mike Grell and it's from 1975's Warlord #2! Mike Grell continued Jack Kirby's double-page spread tradition in his own style and it was glorious! Is it any wonder Mike Grell's Warlord is at the top of my favorite Groovy Age DC characters list?"

The 'splash' in question was this:

Damn. That brought back some memories.

One weekend in the month of December, 1975, I was with my maternal grandmother at the local grocery store. While she was doing her shopping I was glued to the spinner rack of comics near the front. I can still see it like it was yesterday. The comic I picked was The Warlord #2, written and drawn by Mike Grell and published by DC.

Some background: Two years prior, I'd started reading the Tarzan and Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Not long after--mostly because of my ERB reading--I bought Conan the Barbarian #38. Maybe six months later, I checked out the Gnome Press edition of Conan the Conqueror from a local library. During the summer of 1975, I picked up Giant-Size Conan #5. As we'll see, I was primed to buy The Warlord #2.

The issue starts out with Travis Morgan--'The Warlord'--hung out to die on a tree limb. Morgan is then attacked by some variety of saber-toothed cats--see the splash page above. He escapes from that peril and goes straight to being a galley slave. Travis is chained alongside another bad-ass named Machiste. The two of them then end up in a gladiatorial school/arena, where they become even more bad-ass and lead a revolt. End of story.

How was I supposed to resist that? I'd just watched Kubrick's Spartacus with my Uncle Mike--the closest thing to an older brother I ever had--a few months before. As I said, I was primed to love this. The 'Inner Earth' world of Skartaris was a heady blend of Burroughs' Barsoom and Pellucidar, along with a meaty portion of Howard's Hyborian Age.

Throw on top of all that Mike Grell's dynamic art, plus the fact Grell was ex-Air Force, just like Travis Morgan. Grell created the Warlord story and concept. He believed in what he was doing. That shone through on every page. Travis Morgan was a man who liked extremes and as few rules as possible. Crash landing his SR-71 in Skartaris was the best thing that could've ever happened to him.

At one point, I had the entire classic run of Grell Warlords from 1st Issue Special #8 all the way through #50. I lost them all in the Flood of 2012. At that point, I still had my battered copy of The Warlord #2.

Here is the original Page Nine from that issue, when Morgan and Machiste--unintentionally--sign up for gladiator school.

So, here we are, full circle in a certain way. I sit here typing in the same room I slept in those fifty years ago when visiting my grandma. Despite decades wandering hundreds of miles hither and yon, I ended up on the land my forefather homesteaded over one hundred and fifty years ago…and I now shop at that same grocery store. There is no magazine rack, let alone a spinner rack, but that is a discussion for another post.

* Lloyd Smith’s blog, Diversions of the Groovy Kind, can be found here.