Warlock

“Even better was Starlin’s masterpiece Warlock. An acid-drenched existential journey that began with some of his best work, Warlock was another reinvention of a preexisting character, a throwaway Kirby concept given flesh and meaning by more urgent times. Warlock was an artificial Adam stepping from a cocoon created by genetic engineers, a notion Kirby left undeveloped in a half-cooked Fantastic Four story.

  Starlin conveyed all the backstory in one of his quirky opening monologues, then set the character free, wrapped now in a billowing, red-and-yellow high-collared cape—the traditional garb of the mystic superhero, you may recall. Adam Warlock was a psychedelic champion who did nothing by halves and who had chosen as his enemy not crime, injustice, or even other superheroes but the Universal Church of Truth, a monolithic star-conquering faith led by a godlike sadist known as the Magus, who just happened to be Adam Warlock’s own corrupted future self!

  In “1000 Clowns!” the ever-suffering Adam Warlock was cast adrift on a planet of clowns, all toiling on a gigantic garbage heap scattered with diamonds. The head lunatic was Len Teans, a near-anagram of Stan Lee, while the clown who painted the same smiling face on everyone he met was Jan Hatroomi, an almost anagram for John Romita, Marvel’s art director and the man who enforced the Marvel house style.

  The word cosmic came to typify these wild forays into the often drug-illuminated imagination, and there were more to come. These strange new superhero stories were created by younger writers and artists, longhairs and weirdos who were pouring into the comics industry, drawn to Marvel’s iconoclastic universe of possibilities.”