208 FANTASY
adventure characters is planned. Red Sonja, meanwhile, has become a cottage industry
at Dynamite Entertainment. An on-going Red Sonja series began in 2005 and has been
supplemented by a number of limited series and specials. In 2007, Dynamite launched
the Savage Tales anthology with Red Sonja in the lead story.
A handful of sword and sorcery comic books are derived from fantasy gaming. Two
titles that began in 1986, Th e Adventurers and Redfox , were not based on specifi c games
but were defi nitely inspired by Dungeons and Dragons–style gaming. Comic books
based on Magic the Gathering began in 1995 from Armada and then from Dark Horse.
In the late 1980s, DC began publishing a number of titles— Dragonlance , Advanced
Dungeons and Dragons , and Forgotten Realms —based on concepts licensed from TSR,
Inc. From 1997 to 2004, British publisher Black Library serialized eleven diff erent
stories based on the Warhammer game universe. Many of the stories are science fi ction,
but the adventures of the elf warrior Darkblade are solidly in the fantasy genre. In 2006,
Boom! Studios began publishing a line of Warhammer comics.
Th ere is often a fantasy element in superhero stories. Superhero universes have
always had plenty of magic-wielding characters, both good and evil, but conventions
such as costumes and code names fi rmly situate the stories in the superhero genre. How-
ever, some superhero titles veer, at least temporarily, closer to pure fantasy. In the 1983
miniseries Sword of the Atom and three specials over the next fi ve years, DC’s shrink-
ing superhero has an odd adventure reminiscent of planetary romance. Conveniently
trapped at the same diminutive size as the lost race he encounters deep in the Ama-
zon jungle, Ray Palmer adds a few Conan-style accessories to his costume and fi ghts a
variety of jungle creatures and enemies with a sword. Hulk had a similar adventure in a
1971 issue written by Harlan Ellison. Hulk is shrunken to sub-atomic size and has the
fi rst of a number of encounters with a green-skinned sub-atomic race. He defends the
kingdom from an evil warlord and marries the Empress Jarella, but she was later killed,
a tragedy that is echoed years later in the 2006 Planet Hulk storyline. Planet Hulk is
essentially a planetary romance as Hulk fi nds himself on an exotic and hostile alien
world. It is also a very traditional barbarian hero story arc as Hulk fi ghts his way from
gladiator slave to king. Th e 2008 sequel, Skaar, Son of Hulk (because Skaar is born on
the planet rather than transported there) is a straightforward heroic fantasy with Skaar
wielding both sword and a form of ancestral magic.
Contemporary fantasy is often closely related to horror because it presents the
unknown aspects of the world we think we know. A few previously mentioned series,
such as Mage, and most of the planetary romances are contemporary. Some of the
best contemporary fantasy in comic books has come from DC’s Vertigo imprint. Th e
Sandman series (1989–96) written by Neil Gaiman , often deals with people in what
we consider the real world encountering Dream and other members of Th e Endless.
Since 2002, in the on-going Vertigo series Fables and various spin-off s, Bill Willingham
has been spinning stories about the characters of fairytales, folklore , and fables who fl ed
their homelands and migrated into our real world. Neverwhere , a 2005 nine-issue limited
series written by Mike Carey with art by Glenn Fabry, adapts Gaiman’s novelization of
