Long ago I fell in love with Mike Grell’s Warlord fantasy epic.  The stories were action packed, the art was dynamic, and the feel of each issue was perfect.  I was 9 years old.

It’s many, many years later, and the original Warlord has long since faded into the pantheon of mostly-forgotten stories – I don’t even think DC’s reprinted the original run, at least not recently.  And with this issue Mike Grell shows that he’s still able to deliver the same kind of pulpy adventure/fantasy tale that he used to, and this comic held the same kind of simple fun as the earliest part of his original run (including a random giant-bird attack!!).  The art wasn’t as smooth as Grell’s old pencils but it was certainly fine, and it captured the same kind of feel that Grell’s own art delivered.  I admit that I was a little disappointed that they didn’t preserve the old splash page formula (in the original series the second and third pages were always a large-screen splash image – in this they only had a single-page splash), but overall this book was everything that I expected.

I’ll stick with it, and I’m curious to see how other people respond to this series emotionally.  For me it’s a straight-up nostalgia book, that, read through the lens of my older, more jaded eyes feels a bit thin, simplistic, and once I get beyond the nostalgia, not completely satisfying.  I was hoping that the storytelling might have become a bit more complex or “deeper,” and perhaps as the issues go by it will be, but for now the nostalgia factor’s enough to keep me reading, if only for a few months until the old charm wears out.