Savage Dragon: 1984 Story To Be Reprinted In Next Month's Issue

While Savage Dragon didn't launch as an ongoing, monthly comic until the early Nineties, most fans know that the character has been around since 1982, first as the Dragon and then taking on the "Savage" in the mid-'80s. During those early years, his appearances were sporadic, but Erik Larsen has never been too far from the character in these last thirty years. One of the earliest stories--a short tale originally published in a black-and-white archives edition, has finally been colored and will be released as a backup feature in next month's Savage Dragon #189. Larsen, who announced his plans to release the story earlier in the week on Facebook, uploaded some of the pages onto the social networking site earlier tonight along with an explanation as to where it came from. "It was originally done for a guy named Paul Curtis who was going to do a big project featuring a pile of mini-comics. I think it was going to be called Plenty O' Comics. As far as I know it never came to pass. It was drawn landscape style. All of these pages are actually two pages--the top being one page and the bottom being another," Larsen explained. "It finally saw print in Savage Dragon Archives #4 (the comic book by that name--not those phonebook-sized reprint collections). It ran in black and white." Of course, he's taking a similar tactic in assembling a digest-sized issue of Savage Dragon, which will also be available to fans as a standard-sized comic. That will be Savage Dragon #190, the next issue after the 1984 story sees print.