From the Glut: Nomads of Antiquity

‘The Glut’ was not all crap, though you had to look hard to find stuff worth keeping.

I’ve decided to post a few example here on the site to give an idea of what Silverwolf and Greater Mercury Comics were competing against.

Up first: Nomads of Antiquity by M.E. Comix.

There’s practically no information available online about this company, which is a shame. Here’s what we know: ‘M. E.’ apparently stood for McNeil Enterprises, after Pierre R. McNeil. The company was based out of Atlanta, Georgia and this first Issue was published in January, 1987.

Altogether, there would be 5 issues of Nomads of Antiquity published. The series’s covers featured limited color and the art by John Skoglund was actually decent for a ‘Glut’ book. I’d have to put it near par with much of what we saw from Greater Mercury Comics.

The cover to issue #1 is particularly well done (for a glut title), eye catching while sporting some glaring problems. Just look at the bent leg on that fiery chick up top…how out of proportion is that leg? It’s almost like they had a 4 person team and said ‘what the hell’ and just added her into the corner

Line weights are nonexistent for much of the cover. And yeah, for a glut title…not too bad! At the least the title conveys what you can expect inside: a superhero team with all sorts of ‘powers’ (note all that fire and energy spottiness), a mix of boys AND girls, and some cat like dude (See Moby’s Gnome #3).

So we start to read and right away we have a problem: the lettering. Silverwolf was (in)famous for it’s use of a Macintosh computer to letter all it’s books, and this is the one time someone might have thought to copy them. No one thinks of the lettering first (or second…maybe third?) when they think about making a comic. I doubt anyone hears about the new Thor and thinks ‘I hope they don’t change the letterer!’, but here we see how much it can effect the book.

The lettering is just not good. You can clearly see the corrections and how they had to squeeze in the word ‘superheroes’. This scan does not nearly show just how liberally the White Out was applied.

Another thing that’s both interesting and amusing is that, much like Kris Silver and Silverwolf, Pierre McNeil chooses to base his heroes out of his home town. In this case, that means the Nomads hail from…Atlanta! Woohoo, eh?

The story is not so bad either; it manages to check all the boxes of a decent origin issue. We meet the dreaded nemesis (a nice bloke named Defiance) and of course get a basic understanding of what brought these heroes together. Two words…time travel. I know, I did not see it coming either.

Here are a few pages for your perusal, so you can get a feel for the interior work. .

All in all, Nomads of Antiquity #1 is not a bad comic…’From the Glut’.

You can click on the pages below for larger versions.