Up next, an experiment in narrative and game-play, and an art-stravaganza...
Rank 22/60: Tomb of Terror
by Pat Mills, David Pugh, Glenn Fabry and Garry Leach
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| A Sláine's-eye view of the world Art by Antony Jozwiak |
Where to read it: Sláine The King
Original run: Progs 447-461 (In the year 1985-1986; story 11 in sequence. Well, it's kind of TWO stories, but they both count as story 11)
The plot: Sláine and his companions quest and battle
their way through a tomb to find and hopefully kill an interdimensional
god-being.
Also, there are two versions of this story, one a traditional comic, one a game
in which YOU are Sláine. The stories aren’t identical, but reading the comic
helps you work out what decisions to make in the game, and fundamentally they are tackling the same narrative.
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| If you play this game as Ukko, choose the 'run away' option... Art by Garry Leach |
Essential pre-reads: this follows on directly from Time Killer. Do read that first.
Analysis: It’s hard for me to be objective here, as it’s this specific story that was my first introduction to Sláine, hitting at a time when I was also just getting into both Dungeons & Dragons and Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. It’s a kind of dungeon crawl with a mix of puzzles, traps, battles and atmospheric settings. So on that level, for me age 8 it was literally perfect.
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| There's even a singalong version Art by David Pugh |
There’s also quite a lot of time given over to character moments, especially in the ‘room of vices’. Frankly, this story is pure adventure. There’s a very clear plot, a well-defined set of characters, and the expectation that not all will survive to the end. There’s not really any history, and the ideas in this tale are more along the lines of trying to imagine impossible things, such as what it might look like to be confronted with a nine-dimensional being. The fact that it gets remotely close to unlocking that imaginative leap is just plain brilliant.
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| I think it's the coiled tubes that really sell how WEIRD this monster is. Art by Glenn Fabry |
But I will say that this is more of an exercise in fun plotting alongside neat character beats, rather than aspiring to any grand narrative. Is that better than the other way around? Kinda. It remains, in all honesty, my favourite Sláine adventure (the comic version, that is; not so much the VERY DIFFICULT game version…)
Writing: 8-10/10 (8 for the game, which is frankly
too hard; 10 for the comic and the concept)
Art: 7-9/10 Fabry here is getting better all the time, but only gets to draw 4 episodes.
However, these episodes include setting up the general snarling but playful
tone of the whole thing, and of course the final epic showdown with a 9
dimensional being.
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| Before he became King, Sláine was a dude who really loved his job Art by Glenn Fabry |
Pugh is more obviously rushed in places, and some of his work with faces is rather jarring next to Fabry - but he brings the goods week on week, when it comes to the backgrounds, the clothing, the monsters and the general sense of 80s gooeyness. It’s kind of perfect for this story, except for the places where it’s not. It’s also worth noting that Fabry is forced to draw the Guledig in a couple of panels and he just can’t, while it remains Pugh’s finest hour.
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| Pugh also knows how to make Elfric look like a raging creep, and he's no slough at drawing architecture, either. |
Brainball count: 6 monsters, 1 giant rat, 4 zombies, 3 bugs, 2 evil ‘humans’, 1 eldritch god.
-that’s in the story version. In the game, you can actually avoid lots of fighting, but also need to fight and kill sometimes to get your warp rating up - but if you take on too many you’ll surely lose. Frankly, you're pretty much guaranteed to die, not a game to expect to complete on your first run-through!
I haven't commented much on the game version. Suffice to say, it has some rather specific rules about warp rating, it's often quite hard to guess which options you 'should' choose, but on the fun/clever side Mills makes it especially tricky to pin down what Sláine would do - sure, he often barges into fights, but he's not stupid, so don't try playing this game as a barbarian whatever you do!
Rank 21/60: The Killing Field and Sláine, the Mini-Series
by Angie Kincaid, Pat Mills and Glenn Fabry
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| If ever there was a Prog cover that marks the point where 'You know, this comic maybe isn't really for kids any more,' THIS is surely it. Art by Glenn Fabry |
Where to read it: Sláine the King
Original run: Progs 582 and 589-591 (In the Year 1988; These could arguably count as two separate stories, but thematically they're very similar, and in a sense both of them are more like stop-gaps between 'The King' and 'The Horned God' so I'm considering them collectively as story 17 in sequence)
The plot: After being crowned king, Sláine leads his
tribe into a successful military campaign against the Formorian sea demons, and
then grows bored waiting to organise an even bigger campaign, with help from
other tribes, to drive the Formorians away for good.
Essential pre-reads: Sláine the King
Analysis: look, this short sequence is barely a story, it’s perhaps more accurate to say “this is as much as Glenn Fabry got done with what might’ve been ‘Sláine the King part 2’, and it's FAR too beautiful not to print.” There’s something to be said for describing these pages as more like fine art than comics. First there’s the gloriously horrible vignette of Sláine marching across a pile of bodies that he either dispatched personally, or ordered to be killed as part of the attack he led. (This is the gist of The Killing Fields, which is billed as a prologue to the long-awaited 'Sláine the King' continuation)
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| THIS is the pile of carcasses that would please Slough Feg... Art by Glenn Fabry |
Then there’s the more contemplative sequence of Sláine waiting around on his throne eager for more killing. It’s not so very far from a sequence from the Bayeux Tapestry, as opposed to a story for a kid’s adventure comic.
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| Sláine is actually quite often bored, like a kid on a rainy seaside holiday who doesn't want to read the Summer Special for a tenth time. Art by Glenn Fabry. |
Repercussions: not much, to be honest – the action here is literally summarized and repeated in the Horned God. With that in mind, you could consider this as a comics-equivalent of a musical number in a show. You don't especially progress the plot forward, by by golly you DO summarise the mood and the emotions of it all.
Writing: 7/10 – it’s almost not fair to rate the
writing on such as short episode as this. BUT it’s also worth acknowledging
that the story, including the art coupled with it, wouldn’t exist if someone
hadn’t worked out a basic scenario. There’s a reason Angie Kincaid gets a
writing credit on The Killing Field even if it only includes a tiny handful
of words. Presumably the scenario itself, and a certain amount of the way to
tell it, was her work.
Art: 10/10 More Fabry wonders – it’s arguably even better than his
Sláine the King work but I can’t score higher than 10/10 can I. Can I??
Brainball count: Tough to say! The Killing Field
shows a literal mound of corpses, with the implication that Sláine has killed
most if not all of them – but they’re mostly human? (I mean, he was meant to be
killing sea demons, ideally not humans - did something go wrong..?). He punches one out, presumably a fatal
blow, so it’s either 1 or many.
In the ‘mini-series’ that follows, he warps out and the text says he kills 30,
but the picture shows maybe 5 if you’re being generous. The text goes on to
suggest a far higher body count at Sláine’s hands, too.
I’m starting to wonder
if this text-based exaggeration is more of Mills showing how Celts liked to aggrandise
their achievements, rather than a literal suggestion of Sláine’s prowess. He
has often said how his vision for Sláine was to show the world of the Celts as
they felt it (glorious, fantastical, filled with riches), rather than
how it actually was (cold, damp and mud-huttish).
Next time, an eclectic collection of weird and wonderful tales when basically everything is firing on all cylinders.
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