Mike Grell's The Warlord To Get Omnibus Editions in 2025

The books will collect all of Mike Grell's run on the title.

By Russ Burlingame

The Warlord, a swords-and-sorcery series created by Mike Grell, remains one of the gems of DC's back cataolog, and it's apparently finally getting some love in the form of a pair of omnibus editions. Grell announced on his website that there would be two large omnibus editions, each of which would collect half of Grell's run on the title. Grell wrote 71 issues of the series (plus some specials and annuals), sometimes with his then-write Sharon Wright on as co-writer, and drew many of the issues and most of the covers. During his run, he also featured future stars like Mark Texiera, Jan Duursema, and Dan Jurgens on interiors.

We confirmed news of the upcoming omnibus editions with DC. It isn't immediately clear whether they will be hardcover or paperback, but given that there are two coming out in rapid succession, it would not be surprising to see omnibus paperbacks in the vein of the collections for James Robinson's beloved Starman run.

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Grell says that the books will "complete my full on on my very first comics creation," which raises the question of whether it might also include his 2008 relaunch of the title, which allowed him to finish the character's story his way, setting the stage for a new generation of Warlord stories that have not yet been written.

Per Grell's own description, "The Warlord tells the story of a US spy pilot whose SR-71 is damaged while on a mission over Russia and plunges through an opening at the North pole into Skartaris, the world at the center on the earth, where creatures of from mythology and Earth's ancient past co-exist amid fantastic cities and leftovers of the civilization of Atlantis. Travis Morgan's struggle to survive in this savage world is the heroic saga of a modern man in pursuit of his destiny in a land beyond time."

The series began as a comic strip pitch, in which Morgan's character would have been an archaeologist rather than a pilot, and Skartaris would have been Atlantis (accessed via time travel). Some elements were changed when Grell pitched the idea to DC, mostly so that he could keep his original pitch -- then titled Savage Empire -- in case The Warlord fizzled at DC.

According to Grell, it almost did -- after guaranteeing the title a year to run, editor Carmine Infantino reportedly planned to cancel it after eight issues anyway.

"Fortunately for me, [longtime DC executive] Jenette Kahn came in within a couple of weeks and basically cancelled Carmine Infantino," Grell told me in 2015. "Jenette was a very astute cookie. She knew the business inside and out, she knew DC Comics inside and out before she ever took over the company. And it turns out that one of her favorite books was The Warlord. When she looked at the publishing schedule, she said, 'Where's The Warlord?' They said, 'Carmine cancelled it.' And she said, 'Well, Carmine's not here anymore, put it back.' And they did. And then when the implosion hit, I got really lucky because everything that wasn't cancelled became monthly."

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"The Implosion" refers to a notorious 1978 event, in which DC cancelled over 30 titles over the course of a few months. The name "the DC implosion" came from "The DC Explosion," a marketing campaign announced in 1978 that increased the number of DC titles, the page count of many titles, and the cover price. The implosion came later in the year, likely in part due to the increased cover price driving some readers out but also in large part due to a series of blizzards in North America that seriously disrupted the supply lines.

Characters from The Warlord have appeared in DC books periodically since the series ended -- most famously, villain Deimos was the big bad in 2015's Convergence crossover event -- but have rarely had major roles. The characters remain closely associated with Grell in the minds of the audience.

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