Warlord

42 years ago - Travis Morgan is born.

24 years ago - 18-year-old Travis becomes an Air Force Pilot.

22 years ago - 20-year-old Travis marries his sweetheart Rachel.

20 years ago - 22-year-old Travis first flies in a battle-zone, becoming an advanced combat & rescue pilot.

19 years ago - 23-year-old Travis's daughter Jennifer is born.

15 years ago - 27-year-old Travis declines promotion, choosing to stay a combat pilot.

14 years ago - 28-year-old Travis divorces his wife Rachel.

8 years ago - 34-year-old Travis stops an experimental trans-dimensional bomb. He is lost in Skarteris where he joins the fight between the city of Shamballah and dark priest Deimos.

3 years ago - 39-year-old Travis's daughter Jennifer manages to open a portal into Skarteris and follow her father, studying to become a sorceress.

2 years ago - 40-year-old Travis marries Princess Tara.

There is a fantastic tradition in comics of self-contained fantasy series that are very much a passion-project for a particular creator. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Christy Marx's 1984 series Sisterhood of Steel over in Epic Comics. If you're looking for one of the greatest examples of this, however, you would be VERY hard pressed not to land on Mike Grell's Warlord. The series began in 1975, and was an absolutely masterful blend of classic sword-and sorcery themes and the old-world science fiction of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs. What's perhaps most fascinating, however, is that it's actually couched right inside the DC Universe proper. By tapping into the classic Jules Verne concept of a hollow Earth, the fantasy landscape of Skarteris is actually meant to exist right inside the modern earth of Batman, Superman and the like. It's a wild juxtaposition, but it's a pretty classic choice by Grell.

Grell's hero Travis Morgan was cut from the exact same cloth that Grell would later use in his re-imagining of Green Arrow in 1987's Longbow Hunters. They're so similar that it's very easy to suggest that they are in fact EXACTLY the same character. Grell has totally admitted as much; he liked to pattern his characters as fantastic versions of himself, which is absolutely a writers prerogative and it's honestly a little refreshing to have him be so up front about it. He made a conscious choice to never involve his Green Arrow into the wilder world of DC, and it's very clear that he was making a similar choice with Travis Morgan, a character that was absolutely existing in his own completely separate story even though it was right under the feet of the rest of the DC world.

There is WAY too much to love in the Warlord stories for us to not include, but there has to be at least a few minor concessions in order to make them function within the larger DC universe. as wonderfully fantastic as the idea of Skarteris existing within a Jules Vernian hollow Earth is, it's just to unwieldy a concept to truly function as part of the larger scope of the DC Universe. Every single event that effects the Earth would by default also effect Skarteris, and there is just no way Morgan's stories could exist as their own separate arc. Sadly, Skarteris has to exist in an alternate, magical plane; like Gemworld or Nightshade. The existence of lots of smaller magical planes is totally allowable thanks to the creation of Gemworld and the other Paths Beyond during the first Shadowpact, so this gives a a serviceable explanation for an alternate plane where the earth is hollow and life continues inside the planet's surface.

It's understood as part of the original Warlord stories that time flows differently within the earth, which has allowed Morgan to age differently and for his son with Princess Tara to grow to adulthood and become the rightful ruler of Shamballah. There are also other characters from the surface that have made their way into Skarteris. We've limited the artificial time acceleration, and limited the number of additional characters traveling to just Morgan's daughter Jennifer. Travis Morgan is a singularly fantastic element of comic fiction, and by including his adventures our version of DC becomes all he more robust.