Letterer: Chris Eliopoulos
Colorist: Gregory Wright
Review: Will Dubbeld
In an occasional fit of brevity, I'll presume everyone is familiar with the Image coup of the 1990s and not go on at length. The long & short of it pretty much entails a good majority of hot Marvel art talent leaving The House of Ideas and forming their own company free from the shackles of work-for-hire contracts.
Kudos for them, I'm all for creators rights!
On the downside, a majority of these gentlemen were artists and not writers.
Not by a long chalk.
I give you Savage Dragon no. 3 as an exhibition . . .
I would've been about 12 years old when Image exploded onto the comics scene, and explode it did. My adolescent fandom bade me buy as many of these hot new titles as possible, and buy I did.
Spawn, Youngblood, Brigade, The Maxx, et cetera, ad nauseum.
Purchases certainly included Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon.
Larsen had wowed me with his tenure on Spider-Man, and I hoped the momentum would carry over to Savage Dragon. Unfortunately, proto-Kirby pencils can't carry a book without a solid writing backbone. After two issues of explosions and punching, our third issue opens with a hospitalized Dragon engaged in mortal combat with stereotypical '90s villain, Inferno!
He, uh, he's a . . . fire guy.
There's an interesting dynamic between Savage Dragon and a handful of supporting characters I'll address directly, but first we should talk about Bedrock.
Not of Flintstones fame.
Of Rob Liefeld's Youngblood.
Bedrock (later Badrock) is, from what I can recall, a teenage dudebro with a giant rock body. Like Paul Chadwick's Concrete without the deep themes. Like Benjamin Grimm without the whimsy. Like Rockslide from the X-Men without the funny.
Bed/Badrock is awaiting Savage Dragon outside his hospital and ambushes our hero! How crass! How undignified!
Several pages of chudds and brakathrooms later, interspersed with some (I assure you) engaging dialogue, the readers mind is blown with the revelation that Bedrock jumped Savage Dragon to, "see if you were tough enough to join Youngblood."
And that's pretty much the book, folks. We get an entirely peripheral and pointless cameo by an incognito Spawn, and a bit of sinister plotting from our puppet master villain, whose name is OVERLORD and his pretty sweet lookin' sidekick, a skull faced horror called . . . Skullface. In an interesting turn of events, an old woman who sees Savage Dragon on the television exclaims, "Rodney . . . you're alive!" before collapsing from the vapors.
Which leads me to believe our hero's given name is Rodney Dragon.
So, back to the dynamism between Savage Dragon and his supporting cast. Throughout the course of the book, Rodney "Savage" Dragon has facetime with:
- A shapely policewoman
- Amanda, a heavy-chested gal who appears willing to have sex with The Dragon in gratitude for saving her life
- A mousy yet girl-next-door type nurse
- A shapely reporter with (probably) a heart of gold
- And lastly, a blond teenage girl
These interactions run the gamut from sly flirtation to Dragon providing a STRONG MALE SHOULDER TO CRY ON for the fairer sex.
At this point I'm unsure if Savage Dragon is Erik Larsen's sexual Conan the Barbarian fantasy or if I'm reading too deeply into things. Either way this book is ludicrous.
Larsen's art is the high point of the book, all things considered. The character design is very simple in that everyone looks like a stereotype 1990s hero or villain from any title, any company. The quality of the art is still there, however. Erik Larsen sure could draw some impressive curly hair on impressive curvy women, and he had an entertaining method of displaying action on the page.
Savage Dragon is still going strong today, though I'm at a loss as to how. I've never met a soul who buys the book. Perhaps there's a large concentration of Dragon fans on the West Coast I'm unaware of, or perhaps Larsen funds print runs with his phat Image monies. In either case, kudos to the parties involved in the continued success of a green, fin-headed supercop, whom looks like he should've been a He-Man character or a Silverhawks villain.
Kudos, I say.
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