4 out of 5

We have so many awesome comics collected from across John Wagner’s / Alan Grant’s early UK comics careers, and then there’s still so much more. Sure, you got me: pitching Doomlord as a fumetti comic, it maybe limits the appeal to those who are drawn (no pun intended) to such things, but now that I’ve read Servitor Vek’s fourth outing – when the book switched over to full art, here drawn by Heinzl with inimitable clarity and a mastery of condensing – I know that I want to read it all.

Doomlord (originally printed in Eagle) tells the story of an alien sent to planet Earth to suss it up for destruction, but it (Vek) sees that cute quality of our planet – humanity – as worthy of saving, and so ignores those orders. There’s some other steps here, involving another Servitor – Zyn – but that’s the gist for our starting point of this storyline, where, naturally, those of Vek’s home planet are not keen on this ignorance, and sense some assassins to kill the alien and finish the job.

The Noxians have the power and technology to steal the visage and memories of others, which is how Vek conducts his human research, and / or escapes from ‘the deathlords,’ who track him through these pages. While you can feel Wagner and Grant kind of stretching to figure out the limits of these powers, and justify when we see the aliens as aliens (a cool design, rooted in the limits of the original costume from the fumetti) versus disguised humans, the strip is rather masterfully plotted to keep Vek on the run, while tipping the scales at various key points. That this manages to be told in 3-page installments that include short catch-up panels each time without it feeling slow or cramped is just the mastery of UK anthology storytelling, and the aforementioned skills of Heinzl, keeping a lot of talking heads fun to watch. And to be clear: this isn’t a comedy book! I feel like that’s what I was expecting, just based on the writers’ history and the look of the Doomlord, plus there’s definitely options for doing this as a fish-out-of-water yuk, but excepting an undercurrent of silliness, which the book allows, it’s told pretty straight, and doesn’t avoid the inherent violence of that these aliens leave a mess of bodies in their wakes.

This Hibernia reprint is in a floppy format, so it’s no thrills, but that’s also kind of charming. Even with that, we get an appreciated foreword from Grant, and a rundown summary of the story so far. The printing is clean, but flat; again, it’s more functional than anything, but I’d buy tons of these if it made it more likely to get to read the rest of this mateial.