12: First Warp

Mike Gold, a fellow comics industry resident of Chicago, had been approached by Rick Obadiah about adapting cult science fiction 70's play Warp into a comic book. After meetings with DC and Marvel, the pair decided to go it alone and publish the comic themselves. Warp would become the launch title for new company First Comics. Neil Adams had done promotional art for the play, but was busy, so instead Gold coaxed Frank Brunner out of comics retirement to plot and pencil the three part adaptation. He then recruited Peter Gillis to script, whom he'd been friends with since the mid 70's fanzine days. 

On the surface, Stuart Gordon and Bury St. Edmund's Warp is an odd choice for adaptation; a campy, scantily clad, tongue in cheek play inspired by classic comic books. Gillis goes into detail on the problematic tone of the series in Amazing Heroes:

"Making it a little straighter was an editorial decision on the part of First Comics. I was instructed to write it the way I did, which really didn't diverge all that much from the plays. In the plays there is a lot of dialogue which is best characterized as pseudo-Stan Lee, which is very often self parodying and very often quite amusing when heard onstage. Acting it out is extremely funny. But in comic books this mock-Stan Lee dialogue just comes off as bad imitation Stan Lee and falls flat. So we tried to make it a bit more serious in order to let some of the really clever lines shine through. It really is cosmic adventure. It really did tread a line between real comic book stuff and slightly goofy parody. The key to doing the book is to do a book that's lighthearted without losing its seriousness."

Warp #1-9 (1983)

Adaptation/Pencils: Frank Brunner
Script: Peter Gillis
Inks: Bruce Patterson

Whatever the intended tone, it's hard to take a comic too seriously sporting a man practically in a mankini on its cover, emblazoned with the caption "The Coming of Lord Cumulus!" The 3 plays are each told over the course of 3 issues, which makes for some frantic action by today's modern decompressed standards.

In the first act, a boorish banker named David finds he's actually Cumulus, the chosen one of other dimensional Fen-Ra. He adapts quickly and ends up fighting his brother Chaos, prince of madness. The unlikely siblings are forced to team up in the second act to combat a bigger bad, the uglier but less imposingly named Xander. It all goes a bit Strange (with a capital Doctor) in the cosmic final act, where they team to stop Infinity (no relation to Eternity, honest) ending everything.

Dialoguing this faithfully must've been a thankless task, as taking the parody out of parody just leaves space fantasy cliché, with occasional awkward levity thrown in. The knockabout tone occasionally lurches to unpleasantness, with incongruous B words bandied about and an early 80's attitude towards gender relations. It's probably wrong to expect more when the cast (bar an obligatory all knowing robed wizard) are all uncomfortably attired in tight swimwear. 

This first half of Warp is readable guff, in standard early 80's fantasy fashion, which Brunner's handsome art elevates to an extent. With the adaptation over, Brunner moved on, leaving Peter Gillis with free reign...