When I first started reading all these comics and blogging on them at my old site, www.berkeleyplaceblog.com, I skipped Skull the Slayer because it isn’t a 616 comic. But this time through, I’m revising my old posts and adding stuff that may not be pure canon, but is close enough because the character ends up merging with the 616 universe and brings their history with them. So, I’m covering Skull–but I’m covering all issues in one quickie post.
Skull feels like a licensed character, like Conan, but he’s not. Steve Gan and Marv Wolfman invented him.
Skull the Slayer was an army pilot who flew through the Bermuda Triangle and got shunted back in time to Earth’s “caveman days.”
The Bermuda Triangle was a popular myth in the ’70s.
A bunch of folks were on the plane with him, and Skull acts as their protector for this story. The cover to issue #2 pretty much sums up the series.
Eventually, aliens get involved. And Merlin, looking especially silly.
And for some reason that I can’t understand, a robot version of Black Knight.
And it ends abruptly, in the middle of the story.
Actually, the artwork on this series wasn’t half-bad. Looks a little like Sal Buscema. Insofar as this series being “non-canon”, how can that be the case when Skull & Company were visited by half the Fantastic Four in Marvel Two-In-One #’s 35 and 36?? I haven’t read those issues in a long time, ( four and a half decades, actually ) but I believe they concluded with Reed and Ben bailing the Skully-bunch out of the past. I am also happy to hear that Mr. Ekko considers the legend of the Bermuda Triangle to be a “myth”, as do I myself. I have spent my entire life studying the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ phenomena, and I am today more convinced than ever before that there is absolutely nothing supernatural going on in the Bermuda Triangle. More planes and ships have gone missing from the American Great Lakes than the Bermuda Triangle. Of course, if you take a long, slender pole and insert it into a globe of the Earth at the precise point of the Bermuda Triangle, it will emerge on the far side of the globe at a point close to Japan, where the Japanese have their own version of the Bermuda Triangle which loses a highly-unusual number of ships and aircraft, called the “Devil’s Triangle”. ( Eastern Hemisphere division ) So- what do I know? I just don’t go on ocean cruises!