InsaneJournal

Crystar #11
Title: Crystar, Crystal Warrior #11 (Marvel, 1985, 40 pages)
Story/Art: Jo Duffy/Ricardo Villamonte

Yes, I bought this on purpose. You wind up with stuff like this in your longboxes when you go through that phase of buying ANYTHING that has a favorite character in it.

Crystar. Comic-book tie-in to a toyline that never even rated a cartoon. It's 80's sci-sword and sorcery -- two factions vying for control of a planet. Good guys are crystal, bad guys are magma. It lasted for all of eleven issues. The big guest stars for the final issue? Alpha Flight.

Quality, right? But at least it has one of the sillier dimensional-transport scenes I've ever seen in a book.

11 dial-up unfriendly scans and a few panels beneath the cut.



The set-up.



It's always a bit of a jolt to look back on these old books and see just how much expository dialogue there is. Fantasy comics are pretty bad about this in general, and I guess the fact that there couldn't necessarily be a lot of back-and-forth between the writer and artist didn't help the matter. Still, I find myself missing the TL;DR aspects some days when it seems like there's not enough dialogue in your average comic to fill a thimble.


Enter Shaman, Puck, and Northstar, who is having his worst hair day on record. Yes, even worse than the mullet.





It's really not that remarkable, but you don't piss off the team doc.



Taken out by a twig. Tsk.



"Jean-Pierre"? Bad editor, no cookie.



I think this artist must have had a severe allergy to backgrounds.




If your kid is that blase about you accidentally opening up dimension rifts, you may be doing magic wrong.





Northstar is surprisingly happy to see the buff, sparkly man in the chainmail onesie. But the magma-men attack before interesting questions can be asked.





Got over that remarkably quickly.

And there was a team-up and molten butt was kicked and two cursed lovers had a remarkably mild reaction to not being able to touch each other ever again. Seriously...



I fear that you're failing to sell me on the depths of your tragedy.



And they all lived happily ever after or something, albeit with the three Alphans still stranded on Crystillium at the end of it all.

So what weird, crack-tastic stuff do you own just because a favorite character of yours has a guest-shot in it?