The Many Faces In Scorpio Rose!

Steve Englehart has been pretty frank about his comic book career in interviews and on his own website and such. In the collected Coyote the book is backed up by a few issues of a short-fused project by Englehart and Marshall Rogers called Scorpio Rose. It was meant to be a trilogy but only ever produced two comic books (both of which I remember buying at the time). They concerned themselves with a Romany mystic of a unusual lengthy life and of the demon who loved her at times. 

The saga was adapted and altered from scripts Englehar produced for DC for a projected Madame Xanadu series. The price for those scripts had been misrepresented to Englehart so he refused to turn them over and that was it for Madame Xanadu until some years later when we met her under the name of Scorpio Rose. 

The series went two issues then Rogers was unable to finish it. Instead of getting a new artist Englehart just left it unfinished but in this collection the layouts Rogers did for the final issue are printed with explanations as to how the story wrapped up. Frankly I found the stories very confusing even without an ending. It's not Englehart's greatest by any means, too much mysticism and Rogers art is  often hard to read. But the story is memorable for another reason which reaches back to Englehart's earliest days at Marvel and a character named Mantis.

Mantis of course was the Celestial Madonna (making a comeback perhaps when comics begin to publish again) and her saga unfolded over a very long time in the pages of The Avengers where she courted Swordsman and Vision and others while trying to understand her role in the universe. She gave birth to a child, also the child of an alien plant-person and supposedly this youngster was meant for great things indeed. Mantis disappeared when Englehart left the series. 

Englehart was attracted to DC by the call of better page rates and he took over the Justice League of America, bringing the same wonderful magic to those pages he brought to the Avengers. One issue introduced a green woman from the starts named Willow who was supposed to be Mantis, her story continuing with a new name and place. 

Then Englehart left DC and in the pages of Scorpio Rose from Eclipse Comics he gave us Lorelei, another green lady who was recognizably Willow and Mantis. She assists Scorpio Rose and we meet her child almost hidden in the shadows. 

Later Englehart brought Mantis back at Marvel, but I will always treasure the days when her story was bigger than any one company. For me it always will be.

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Gold Rush!

I grew up a Marvel fan for the most part and what I knew of the Marvel Universe like everyone else was found in their countless comics produced over decades. Then at last I wearied of the chase and the comic universe the MU had become was not recognizable. Many years before Marvel had at long last found success in the movie theaters with series like Blade and The X-Men, and later the Avengers cycle. As I drifted farther and farther from the comics the movies became the centerpiece of what I know as the Marvel Universe. And in that cinematic universe much is made of the uber villain Magneto and his beginnings as a waif who loses nearly everything in the monstrous death camps of the Nazis. The films have made an empathetic character out of the villain if not at all times a sympathetic one. That began in this comic. 

Written by Chris Claremont and drawn by the late Dave Cockrum, this X-Men story finds the team in the middle of one of their never ending sagas while inside the mind of Professor Xavier a different battle is going on. We see in his memories a time twenty years before when he was helping Holocaust survivors come to terms with the suffering they'd endured. He meets a man named Magnus and slowly they learn that they both are mutants. The arrival of an up and coming Hydra causes them to fight together to save a young woman who holds the secret of vast gold reserves in her war scarred psyche. It's a good tale, not a great one, but making Magnus a survivor of Auschwitz utterly transform a villain who to that time was largely a cruel enigma. 

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