An aside: Marvel Premiere and its sibling title Marvel Spotlight were "tryout" books. A character or series might get one, or several issues, to see if sales justified giving the series/character their own book. A few made it. Many did not.
You ever have one of those experiences, where something you thought would probably be good turns out to be ever better than you'd hoped? So it was with Weirdworld. That issue of Marvel Premiere immediately became, and remains to this day, one of my favorite comics.
The story (which is actually titled "The Lord of Tyndall's Quest") tells of Tyndall, an elf - not an Orlando Bloom elf, but rather a small, slender, pointy-eared and childlike figure, who has been sent forth from a community of dwarves - more the Disney variety than the John Rhys Davies kind, I might add - alone, with a sword, into a place called The Region of Shadow, a monster-haunted wilderness, to destroy something called "The Heart of Evil". Tyndall isn't even sure what the Heart is, or how to destroy it, but he doesn't see a lot of options.
There, in the skeletal remains of some giant monster, Tyndall finds a large glowing egg, which he assumes is The Heart of Evil. To his surprise, the egg hatches. To his even greater surprise, it hatches a full-grown elf girl named Velanna. Tyndall realizes the whole thing had been a set-up. It was either intended that he'd kill Velanna, or die in the attempt, and either way, there'd be no more elves (Tyndall and Velanna seem to be the only elves in the world). Together, he and Velanna set out to find a home for themselves.
They are almost immediately captured by Grithstane, a wizened, evil old wizard. Grithstane has an elf-girl chained up in his caverns, with whom he wants to make elf-whoopie, but is incapable, since she has no interest in making it with his ancient, decrepit self. He needs the blood of a dragon, and thus, holding Velanna hostage, sends Tyndall of to Klarn, a floating, ring-shaped island in the sky, to get some. On Klarn (which happens to be Tyndall's apparent point of origin, but of which he knows nothing), Tyndall fights some troglodytic tribesmen, another elf-girl who changes into a swamp serpent (giant swamp snakes, a sample of which is shown on the issues' cover), and finally a dragon. Returning to Grithstane's, he finds the captive elf-girl had some dark secrets of her own...
Weirdworld was drawn by Mike Ploog, my favorite 70's Marvel artist. Ploog did lots of great things, but this may well be my favorite (if it isn't, then his issues of Frankenstein are). Owing more to Ghastly Graham Ingels and (especially) Will Eisner, Ploog's stuff was pure otherworldy fantasy; elegant, dark, funny and scary - often all at the same time. It's one of the most beautiful comics Marvel published in the 70's.
The author was Doug Moench. Moench was one of comics' warhorses in the 70's, starting out writing horror stories for Warren's Creepy and Eerie, then rolling into Marvel where he knocked out a slew of titles, most notably Deathlok and Master of Kung Fu. He was always reliably good and occasionally excellent (particular note goes to his part in the Batman "Knightfall" cross-over series in the 90's). Weirdworld was special, though. Moench really seemed to put his heart into this and it showed. There was simply nothing else quite like it around at the time.
I loved that comic and read it again and again, and waited fervently, hoping Weirdworld would get spun off into its own series.
It took awhile. But about a year or so later, Marvel announced, not a new regular book, but a magazine-size Weirdworld miniseries, to be titled Warriors of the Shadow Realm. What's more, Warriors was to be a bold experiment, with artwork that was not merely colored line drawings, but actual painted color process. This held the potential to be spectacular stuff. One disappointment though; Ploog was no longer working for Marvel. Drawing chores were to be taken by John Buscema. Buscema was a fine and legendary artist who'd done some excellent stuff when he first came to Marvel in the late 60's, but by the 70's he was largely hacking it out. Still, the one-panel sample which appeared in Starlog looked pretty great.
Well, Warriors arrived in the early summer of `79 and, if it wasn't quite the spectacular Marvel had promised (when did that ever happen?), it was still a gorgeous piece of work that looks even better today. Buscema might have been phoning in Conan et al, but he brought his A-game here. What's more, he showed a side we'd never seen before. Despite a few standard Buscema faces (Big John had a limited bag of tricks), the art owed less to Jack Kirby and a lot to Arthur Rackham. Rudy Nebres' inks brought out the best in it, and Peter Ledger's airbrushed and painted coloring was a wonder to behold. Warriors had a different feel than Ploog's work, but it was stunning in its own right.
Despite some good reaction (I guess) and many promises, Weirdworld then lay dormant for nearly three years, before finally reappearing in the pages of Epic Illustrated, Marvel's early 80's attempt to compete with Heavy Metal.
"The Dragonmasters of Klarn", a 4-part serial, couldn't compete with Warriors for sheer artistic grace - mainly because Marie Severin's inks didn't reproduce well (I've seen shots of the b&w originals and they look terrific, and Marie was one of the all-time greats), and Steve Oliff's paintings just couldn't compete with Peter Ledger's glorious colorfests. Still, the story maintained the tone of the earlier tales, which was what made them special, and even managed to advance it a bit: Velanna, under the influence of an(other) evil magicians' spell, turns into a cold-hearted bitch, while a hurt and confused Tyndall is forced to finally graduate from brave boy to courageous man, and learns something about himself in the process. All in all, it was a worthy next chapter.
After that, Weirdwold wasn't seen again for several years. In 1986, a partially completed first third of a three-part story - "The Weremen of Lord Raven", originally started by Ploog and Moench in 1979, before Warriors of the Shadow Realm, was dusted off. Pat Broderick worked up the final two installments from Moench's script. This story pre-dated Warriors, and in fact told of Tyndall and Velanna's first meeting with Mud-butt. The story was still a winner, but Ploog's art on part 1 was less polished than his other works, and Broderick's work on the remainder of the story lacked the luster of Ploog or Buscema's art. It was still Weirdworld. By then Moench had fallen out with Marvel and was over at DC, working on Batman. Weirdworld as we know it was never seen again.
In the first issue of Warriors, Doug Moench told his own story of the genesis of Weirdworld, which, he says, came to him almost spontaneously, and owed more to the fairy tales of his childhood, and to Walt Disney ("an imaginary, unmade Disney film recalled from childhood - but existing only in my mind") than to Tolkein. He also recounts the difficulties he had getting those first two stories published and placed. It's doubtful that many saw "An Ugly Mirror on Weirdworld", or that many Punisher fans would have considered it anything but stupid, so the Marvel Premiere had to have been a labor of love. It also must have done pretty well, for Marvel to take on such a costly and risky project as Warriors of the Shadow Realm. Based on the low-profile follow-ups, and long intervals between them, for Weirdworld, I'm guessing Warriors didn't exactly set the comics world on fire.
That's a shame, but maybe not a surprise. In Moench's own words, Weirdworld was always "...different... there was no real place for it in the market for which it was written. it simply did not belong." And that's probably true. Certainly it didn't fit the mold art-wise - Ploog or Buscema, it looked like nothing else out there. Even moreso, it didn't fit the mold character-wise. Tyndall and Velanna were small, slight, childlike, almost powerless, and hopelessly innocent and naïve. They didn't have much in common with Conan or Wolverine, after all. Stephen King once noted that the greatest fantasies are about characters who acquire power. The lesser ones are about characters who merely wield power. There's some truth in that, and that's very much the point of Weirdworld. Tyndall in particular becomes braver, more knowledgeable, and more confident as the stories progress. That's not what comics fans are used to. That, and their childlike appearance and demeanor may well have thrown off fans. And indeed, such characters risk becoming cloying. That never quite happens, but it was a close call sometimes. Initially, I found Mud-butt intrusive, but reading the stories now, its clear he brought a necessary edge of cynicism and humor to the proceedings.
If Weirdworld resembles anything out there in comics-land, its Richard and Wendy Pini's Elfquest, which also combined gorgeous art, fantasy, and childlike-looking characters. But Elfquest (which started appearing not long after that Marvel Premiere issue - I doubt that it was influenced by Weirdworld, but I'm sure the Pinis were aware of it) is still harder-edged, and far more epic in scope. Also the Pinis were self-publishing, and thus not at the mercy of a corporate entity with its eye one the bottom line.
Given the growth in popularity of fantasy, and Dungeons and Dragons, throughout the 80's, it's surprising to me that Marvel didn't give Weirdworld another try (apparently head honcho Jim Shooter did meet with the TSR people over a possible D&D comic, but nothing came of it). Then again, by 1983, Moench had bailed on Marvel, along with many of the other 70's-era gang, and it may simply be that Weirdworld no longer had a champion at the Bullpen. Perhaps, too, Weirdworld was too much of a personal project for Moench, who had been at loggerheads with Shooter, and Marvel didn't care to risk another lawsuit ala the infamous Howard the Duck debacle. Or all of the above. Interestingly, though he's been interviewed a number of times, Moench seems not to have said much of anything about Weirdworld. Perhaps its lack of acceptance was hurtful to him, or perhaps he simply moved on.
But I suppose, the story is told. Weirdworld is ultimately about Tyndall and Velanna's quest to find their place in the world. And if that isn't quite where it leaves off, the final Weirdworld story does a more mature, wiser and confident Tyndall, who's at least beginning to find answers.
In 2015, Marvel began another series titled Weirdworld. Alas, it had nothing to with this series.
Also in 2015, they published a paperback collection, Weirdworld: Warriors of the Shadow Realm, which collects all of the above and most of the extra features from the Warriors issues as well. It's a nice collection and great to have everything under one cover, but the artwork from Warriors is not well reproduced (smaller than its original print size, and darker), so if you're really interested I recommend picking up the original issues as well (they seem to go for between $5 and $10 apiece).
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