During his salad days at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs I am certain that Cadet Travis Morgan, as part of his overall officer training programme, was introduced by one of his tutors, to the ideology of total warfare as espoused by Carl von Clausewitz. This philosophy means that everything you do and say must be directed to defeating your enemy. It doesn’t matter who your enemy is; just as long as that adversary is completely annihilated.
That particular lesson must have really sunk into the young Mr Morgan’s mind because he has lived by that doctrine all throughout all his publishing history, no matter what it cost him personally along the way. This man has had it all and then casually tossed it away. During his varied adventures he has been a hero, a king, the future President, a father, a friend and also a mentor but through it all he has never, ever been contented with his lot. At one time or another, every friend and family member have been summarily discarded because the Warlord wanted to ride out and consort with the angel of death one more time.
He has always reminded me of that guy in your local bar who is not out to enjoy himself but is really there just to have a brawl with the first poor unfortunate person who catches his eye. It honestly doesn’t seem to matter to these people that there is no legitimate reason for the mayhem they cause because in their own mind it is justified under the total war doctrine. Everybody is a potential enemy. The best form of defence seems to be an intensive care unit for everyone else.
Morgan, in my opinion, is a character stuck like a fly in amber. No matter what developments come his way we always eventually end up with the big altercation scene. The body count is always high in a Warlord story and his foes are dispatched with as much gory force as possible. If this comic character had been around in the early fifties it may have been condemned by Dr Wertham for its overuse of stylised violence. In these more hardened times we are no longer expected to comment on these things at all because comics are now an art form for adults.
However, I do chose to comment.
I find the level of bloodshed in this book disturbing and what bothers me even more is that I feel there is no real story developmental purpose to the majority of it. To my mind this whole exercise is just meta-plot. Everything other than the battle scenes are just filling up pages until we reach another scenario to let the dogs of war off the leash again and I for one don’t want to read any more of it.
Still if pressed, I would have to admit that the book wasn’t totally bad.
I did enjoy the cover.
Warlord #3 earns 1 out of 5 Stars.
Marlowe Lewis is old. I mean really, really old. So old in fact, that the first ever sequential art that he ever saw was when his lifelong friend in their small clan began painting bison on the cave walls. This was a true turning point in his life. Firstly, he was immediately and irrevocably hooked on the visual arts, and secondly he discovered another use for dried bison dung.
Marlowe Lewis is British. This is not an apology.
Loading ...
While I enjoyed the first two issues, this one left me wondering, how the hell did those two manage to become dictators in such a short period of time? How much time passed since they arrived?