William B. DuBay's The Rook Archives Vol. 2 (Superhero)

by William B. DuBay (writer), Luis Bermejo, Alex Nino, Abel Laxamana, & Jose Ortiz (illustrators) 

Publisher: Dark Horse Books (July 18, 2017)

Hardcover 152 pages

          Continuing on with the Rook stories which appeared in Eerie  magazine, we come to the second of three volumes. This book collects those tales which first appeared in Eerie 87 - 96 and Vampirella  70. Here, we have Restin Dane, “The Rook” and “Master of Time” continuing his bizarre journeys across space and time. At this point the time travel is optional as half of the stories in here take place during the “present” time of 1978.

          We have the first crossover hero team-up in Warren history, as The Rook meets Vampirella, the alien vampire from the planet Draculon (I kid you not, that is the name) who fights the powers of chaos that want to take over the world. Vampirella. She has just come back to Earth with a group of other aliens. Here the pair go on a violent adventure to destroy a monster that feeds on energy. Realizing that the monster has the power to destroy the world, they decide to go back in time to the Mesozoic era to prevent the creature from ever being deposited on the planet.

          The Western theme from the first stories are tossed aside and the stories become full on insane. We have aliens invading time, a six million year old man, robots rampaging, trips to the moon, and so on. The characters have really come into their own here. The writing is much stronger than the first volume, the writer is obviously surer now that the initial Western ideas have been used up, while the art remains strong- for the most part. The two exceptions being a flip story, where you have to turn the book on its side (which I always dislike) and the inking is off. The second is the story from Vampirella 70, which contains a continuity error (the two characters meet each other for the first time twice) and the art seems slapdash and hasty.

          The creator of the series and its titular character was William DuBay , not an immediately familiar name, but still an influential one behind the scenes. He cut his teeth on Warren publications writing stories for Eerie, Creepy, and Vampirella. The character was created at the insistence of publisher Jim Warren who wanted to create a new craze, so DuBay (along with Budd Lewis) wanted to work with the adventure western stories of yesteryear, but added a time travel spin so that there would be more scope to what the character could do- which is obviously true for anyone who’ve even glance through the book. After Warren folded, he went on to help found Marvel Productions (an animation studio) with Stan Lee, then moved over to Fox animation.

           For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.