When I travel, it's always nice to find foreign editions of American comics in their shops. DC and Marvel are pretty easy to come by, as are licensed IP, and I can often find something from a mini-major like Image/Dark Horse/etc. But something more obscure-- older and more nostalgic-- or especially something with a personal connection? That's a rare prize. So imagine how pleased I was to find an artifact of one of my all-time favorite comic series, and one of the few long-running titles that I've retained a complete set of? When I visited Chicago for the first time, hitting both their major con and some local shops, I was bummed that I couldn't find much of anything from the greatest local publisher the Windy City ever had, First Comics. And of course what I most wanted to find was something related to John Ostrander & Timothy Truman's
Grimjack. So of all places and things, how about a beat up digest edition reprinting 1984's
GrimJack #1 in Cologne, Germany instead?
Condor was the regional publisher of such properties as
Spider-Man, Sesame Street, Tom & Jerry, Mad Magazine, Looney Tunes, Pink Panther, and The Hulk, among many others, including regional fare. They did a fair amount of second hand licensed stuff from Dell/Western/Gold Key, and in fact I almost got a digest that combined Magnus Robot Fighter with Buck Rogers ('79) material. They also dabbled in some Eclipse and Charlton stuff, like DNAgents. Still, one of their deepest reaches has to be a digest series devoted to the comic book adaptation of the stage play
Warp. The title ran for 19 issues and a few specials in the States, and the German reprint made it through much of that material in the first two digests. The third and final one got a bit creative, starting with
Warp Special #1: Chaos: Prince of Madness, the first reference to the pan-dimensional city of Cynosure, the setting of Grimjack and the main connective tissue between the diverse First line. Then we slide into
Lord Cumulus vs. Sargon Mistress of War!
Then we pivot to Grimjack, who is also inserted into a Warp collage on the cover. Like First Comics themselves, Condor were probably recognizing the limitations in Warp, and pursuing the much longer-lived adventures of a scarred mercenary. They could have easily threaded the strips from
Starslayer into this reprint series, but they jumped right into doing the first full issue instead, with a two page text piece on John Gaunt besides. The book then closes, sadly forever, on an Ostrander-scripted Sargon back-up from
Warp #5. Maybe things would have turned out better if the series had led with Grimjack, but the solo ongoing had just started late in 1984, so there probably wasn't enough material banked or demand identified until it was too late. I'm just glad I managed to tumble on the sole edition with the Grinner. And hey, bonus Indiana Jones ad!
DC in Germany
