Sunday, May 05, 2024

Sunday Splash Page #321

 
"Stability Check" in Lost Planet #3, by Bo Hampton (writer/artist), Tom Littlejohn (colorist), Tracy Hampton (letterer)

A 6-issue mini-series about a treasure hunter named Tyler Flynn, seeking a fabled mountain, and finding himself in another world. One with dinosaurs, and dark wizards and quicksand and hot redheads that are good at archery. Broadswords and leather armor, dark castles with glowing green pits that are gateways to otherworldly horrors, giant talking carnivorous insect people.

Hampton basically throws in about every variety of pulp stuff he can think of, most of it illustrated with neat, thin linework. He or Littlejohn go heavy on the shadows occasionally, mostly when the scene involves Zorrin, the evil (and increasingly unstable) wizard-king.

Flynn is only occasionally heroic, usually when there's no other option, but he manages to stay alive (with some help.) As it turns out, he's far from the first person from Earth to stumble into this world. So much so the little hobbit guy he meets anticipates all his questions (and provides him a book with a primer on the local language, nice fella.) Hampton makes at least some of the others people famous for disappearing. Judge Crater's in there as a lackey of Zorrin's. Sort of a Sheriff of Nottingham to Zorrin's Prince John. The guy not wanting to cross the bridge is Ambrose Bierce. Amelia Earhart's there, although she spends two-thirds of the story as a drugged prisoner of Wizard-King Zorrin.

Hampton adds some backstory to the world where it was once technologically advanced, then destroyed itself in war. And in the aftermath, science was driven into the shadows in favor of magic and sorcery and whatnot. It's meant to explain how people are being transported from Earth to this place, and why the device was hidden in the mountains in a remote region of South America, but it feels like one more layer than was necessary.

And with that, we reach the end of the "L"s.

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