William B. DuBay's The Rook Archives Vol. 3 (Superhero)

by William B. Dubay, (writer), Jose Ortiz, Jim Starlin, Alfredo Alcala, Lee Elias, & Jim Janes (illustrators)

Publisher: Dark Horse Books (November 21, 2017)

Hardcover 128 pages

 

         The volume collects the final stories of The Rook, Master of Time, that appeared in Eerie magazine issues 98 -105, before the entire series became its own magazine. In 1980, The Rook hit market places and ran for fourteen issues, becoming Warren Publishing’s biggest hit, before the entire company folded.

          For those who haven’t read the first two volumes, the stories revolve around Restin Dane, a genius inventor and time traveler, who journeys to different time in a machine shaped like a rook from a game of chess- hence his nickname. His sidekicks include his great-grandfather, whom Restin saved from the Alamo, and a prissy robot (Restin Dane is also a robotic genius) name Manners, who acts as Restin’s valet and as a foil for the great-grandfather.

          The stories in this volume are stranger still than the previous one. A writer I know remarked in the past that when she starts a new series there are several ideas she has as to where it will go, what characters the protagonist will encounter, what plot points will crop up, but as it goes on those initial ideas dry up and that's when true inspiration comes into play, that’s when her best material appears. I think that’s what happened here.

          The basic formula of the tales is that Restin Dane aka The Rook travels alone to some point in the past and finds some impossible trouble, such as a lost city of Asian warriors in Death Valley or an army of clockwork murder bots crafted by Adolph Hitler’s father. This he eventually oer comes with his superior intellect and fists. Then the B-story has The Rook’s great-grandfather, Bishop Dane, angry at being left behind again and running off with the valet robot, Manners, and getting into some sort of shenanigans that he just barely extricates himself from before The Rook reappears, such as traveling to Hong Kong in 1802 to become a pirate or a lone alien landing in the Florida swamps.

          The writing is sharp and on track, even if the stories are derivative of past successful stories at the time, taking riffs from Kun-Lun  from Iron Fist and an obvious parody (but well done) of Terry and the Pirates. The art goes overboard, some of the best I’ve seen in The Rook series. Bold grey tones, mixed with sweeping details and palpable sense of action, which just blew me away. It took me longer than usual to finish this book because I was spending so much time admiring the art.

          I just have to end on this note. Restin has brought his great-grandfather into “the present” of 1979 in a permanent capacity it seems. So that means either the old man has to go back and knock up a random woman, then stick around long enough to hang his name on the bastard, or the old man already has a family that he abandoned to go play around in the future. As far as I know, this little issue is never addressed.

           For more readings, try books by Rex Hurst.