Dagar the Invincible #19

The first time Dagar the Invincible was published, it had a cover price of 15¢. After a 17 issue run, the series concluded with a reprint of that first issue origin story, with a cover price of 30¢. Over five years later - for whatever reason - Whitman Comics decided to reprint that first issue as a standalone comic with no number attached (commonly referred to by fans as 'issue 19') for a cover price of 60¢; which I guess goes to show that back then comic prices were doubling every 5 years.

To bolster the page count Whitman tacked on a few short story comic reprints, 'The Man Who Thought He Had Wings' & 'The Man Condemned to Live' from Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #11, and 'Ghost Dog' from Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #2. They have high quality artwork by Joe Orlando, and Joe Certa, but are otherwise fluff.

Gold Key always had beautiful painted covers, and for some reason (couldn't get ahold of the original art? didn't want to negotiate residuals? didn't think painted art would sell like line art? who knows?) Whitman decided instead to convert the original cover painting to a crude flat pen and ink tracing of the original. Why, Whitman, why?

Anyway aside from my notes about the original cover, what follows is my review of the original first issue of Dagar the Invincible:

Dagar was Gold Key's barbarian hero. Unlike most comic barbarians, he wasn't depicted as having sun-bronzed skin and black hair, but was instead a pale-skinned blonde. His nemesis - at least in the first issue - is a skeleton visaged sorcerer called Ostellon.

The story is one of the more clever ones in the sword and sorcery genre for its time. It starts out with the usual chain of events: an invading army raids Dagar's village when he's a boy. They bear a distinctive symbol (in this case a scorpion). Dagar is one of the only survivors. He's raised by his grandfather, taught to be a warrior; vows vengeance, etc. etc. One day he rescues an old man from some living skeletons. The man shows Dagar a vision of his beautiful daughter who's been kidnapped by Ostellon who intends to take her for his bride. Dagar is smitten, and wielding a magic weapon provided by the old man, he sets off to free the damsel. But then, toward the end of the story, just when it seems like Dagar's quest has been successful, there's an interesting twist.

The look and feel of Dagar the Invincible is a little different from that of most barbarian heroes of the period. The setting is neither some ancient Bronze Age 'time of myth', nor some post-apocalyptic wasteland, but a like a stone age dawn of civilization period, where prehistoric animals still exist (yet strangely, swords and metal weapons do too).

Now if the blonde barbarian who's pretty civilized fighting the skeleton sorcerer seems a bit familiar, you should know that this series was written by Don Glut - the same Don Glut who a decade later would be hired by Mattel toys to create the characters and back story to Masters of the Universe. So while a case could definitely be made for plagiarism here, it would be a case of self-plagiarism (and given the similarity of all of this to Kull and Thulsa Doom - at least the Marvel version - and the failure of Robert E. Howard's heirs' lawsuit against Mattel, any such claims are a difficult proposition to begin with).

Though mostly forgotten today, Dagar the Invincible actually lasted over four years - a pretty long run for a comic title in those days - so it's worth checking out why so many fans embraced a title that even Gold Key didn't expect was going to be quite so successful. In fact the original title of this comic was Tales of Sword and Sorcery, as you can see by the small print on the cover, Dagar was just supposed to be one feature, but he was so successful that it became Dagar's own self-titled comic.