This is a blog series about … well, series. I love stories that continue across volumes, in whatever form: linked short stories, novels, novellas, television, movies, comics.
Beyond The Farthest Star: Warriors of Zandar
Publisher: American Mythology
Publication Date(s): 2022
Writer/Editor: Mike Wolfer
Pencils and Inks: Allesandro Ranaldi
Colors: Arthur Hesli
Letters: Natalie Jane
Last week on Series Saturday, I reviewed American Mythology’s recent four-issue mini-series Pellucidar: Across Savage Seas featuring Gretchen Von Harben, the first of two comic book series officially considered canonical Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe entries. Beyond The Farthest Star: Warriors of Zandar is the second of those series, and stars Gretchen Von Harben’s daughter Victory Harben.
Over the past two years, readers of the “Swords of Eternity Super-Arc” series from Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. (Carson of Venus: The Edge of All Worlds by Matt Betts; Tarzan: Battle for Pellucidar by Win Scott Eckert; and John Carter of Mars: Gods of the Forgotten by Geary Gravel) have been introduced to Victory, learned a bit about her childhood, and bore witness to a few of her many adventures bouncing through space and time thanks to an accident involving the Gridley Wave that allows those in Pellucidar to communicate with the surface world. Beyond the Farthest Star: Warriors of Zandar is another of those space-and-time-bouncing adventures, in which Victory finds herself on the far-off titular planet and smack in the middle of a battle between two races: the peaceful Ki-Vaas and the brutal Keelars. As usual, the out-going and gregarious Victory makes a new friend almost immediately, which pulls her further into the local conflict: the Keelars are harvesting the Ki-Vaas and subjecting them to a device that extracts and saves the life-force of anyone placed in it.
Writer Mike Wolfer paces the main story – Victory and her friend’s attempts to rescue the captive Ki-Vaa and stop the Keelars – pretty perfectly across the four issues, once again easily matching Edgar Rice Burroughs’ prose style in comic book form. Complications abound before Victory and her compatriots solve the problem at hand, but there is a resolution to the main story. We also get a nice look into Victory’s character: her sense of social justice, her willingness to do the right thing even at great personal peril, her open-hearted nature. In Wolfer’s hands, Victory Harben continues to be a character I want to know more about and want to see in adventure after adventure.
There are some unresolved secondary plots, but as this is definitely not Victory’s final adventure I’m not concerned that they will remain unresolved for long. I am intrigued by references to the Keelar’s unseen master “The One from Above,” a figure who remains mysterious and unseen even in the final issue of the mini-series. I’m also wondering just how long Victory will remain on Zandar and whether this world will also be the setting for Christopher Paul Carey’s upcoming novel Victory Harben: Fires of Helos, which is the final installment in the “Swords of Eternity” Super-Arc mentioned above.
Wolfer also does a wonderful job, mostly via dialogue that doesn’t feel like an info-dump and never feels out of character, conveying the differences between the Ki-Vaa and Keelar societies. Burroughs, in his Mars and Venus books especially, was known for making sure his alien planets were populated with a diversity of physical and societal types where so much science fiction of the time (and even in the more recent past) took the short-cut of having homogenous planet-wide societies. The latter may make for easier storytelling, but it also feels a bit unrealistic.
Allesandro Ranaldi’s artwork is highly expressive and really conveys the alien nature of the planet Victory has found herself on. Wolfer conveys via dialogue the differences between the two societies, and Rinaldi shows us the very large difference in physicality. The Ki-Vaa are humanoid but distinctly not human, while the Keelar are blockier, for lack of a better term. (It’s probably not intentional on the part of the artist, but the Keelar remind me of shorter, hairless versions of Looney Tunes character Gossamer.) Arthur Hesli’s colors make this new world pop.
Victory Harben is not the only connection between this series and the greater canonical Edgar Rice Burroughs Universe: the planet Zandar is in the same solar system as Poloda, the planet introduced in the novel Beyond the Farthest Star (hence the lengthy title of the mini-series). Farthest Star is one of my favorite Burroughs novels. We’ll never know what Burroughs intended for Tangor, the hero of the novel, or Poloda or the solar system as a whole – but ERB Inc. clearly has plans for them. Victory Harben is, I think, the ideal character to bridge the gap between Farthest Star and the rest of the canonical ERBU.