Adron, Re

 

Adron, Re (Adron, King), started off as a weekly comic strip in the Sunday Maltese language newspaper, Il-Mument. The strip ran from late 1981 to the first months of 1982. The book version (self-published in 1982 and distributed by North Star Publications) was a collection of the strips, with a few changes and some added pages that linked the different episodes together.

 

The drawings on Adron, Re now look rough and uncultured (which they most definitely are), but they indicate early experimentations with the comic strip format in Malta; the exploration of the interplay between panels, sometimes the ignoring of the intransigent demarcation among panels for the sake of narrative. The influences here are clearly Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, particularly as interpreted by Roy Thomas and Barry Smith in the early issues of the Conan comic published by Marvel comics. The result is a fanboy's tribute, very amateur and crude, but with a dynamism that could only come with the deep enthusiasm for the genre.

 

The story is about Adron, who was once the king of Valtusja, a land in a far off time in which anything was possible - even sorcery. With the help of the sorcerer Ezra-Dim, the tyrant Davinu took Adron's throne. The latter is helped by the Grand Visier Bodri to look for an enchanted medallion, with which to return the natural order in his country.

 

This page contains the cover and three of the internal pages of the graphic novel.