30 days of comics I love #18: You think the stain'll lift?

Warrior #26 

By Dez Skinn and pals 

You could always tell when a British comic paper that went after a slightly more sophisticated audience is about to fade away, because that's when the European reprints start overwhelming things. The comics from the continet are fun and stylish, but they're always a sign that the comic is running out of money.

Warrior only lasted a couple of years in the early eighties, but left behind a great legacy, if only because it was the first palce that Alan Moore's Miracleman and V For Vendetta appeared. The 26 black and white issues that were produced had a lot more than just Moore's post-modern superheroics going for it, before blazing out with this final issue.

Even at the end, and even with the overseas reprint crowding things out, the last issue of Warrior was a lot of fun. Moore and Lloyd were still doing V For Vendetta right till the end, and while Miracleman was absent, publisher Dez Skinn was still doing the very strange Big Ben spin-off with Will Simpson, and it is one of the very few comics that has both Moore and Grant Morrison in the credits box. 

The Morrison story - Liberators with the great John Ridgeway - is the first chapter of something that went exactly nowhere, but still hints at future greatness for the writer, while you also get a silly four-pager from a very young Carl Critchlow.

But, despite promises of big doings in the next issue, that was it for Warrior, although that more mature audience would still be a target for the rest of the decade, with comics like the brilliant A1 limited series giving writers and artists greater creative freedom, or efforts like Crisis and Deadline taking things in a more political and nihilistic directions.

So while this Warrior dies here, at least it goes down fighting and resides in the halls of comics Valhalla, where plenty of others would soon join it, once they resort to cheap reprints.