One of the benefits of a quarter-bin sale is coming across random issues of random series, even if they’re from the middle of the run. Sometimes I like picking up those books, especially if they are from a long-running series, like The Amazing Spider-Man or Action Comics. Sometimes, I know the character from another series or a movie, like the random Conan the King comic I bought several years ago that led to to collecting the entire series.

Arion is a case of the latter. I first saw this character in Crisis on Infinite Earths #1, where he was recruited by Harbinger to aid The Monitor in protecting the multiverse from an approaching wave of anti-matter. I didn’t know anything about him at the time, but the concept seemed pretty cool. He was a great sorcerer of Atlantis, living before the mythical city sunk and eventually became the home of Aquaman. Later, I’d read his entry in Who’s Who and would be intrigued but never sought out the title.

Back in 2019, I found the first issue in a bin and read it. It was a good comic, but my verdict was that it didn’t hook me enough to want to look for other issues in the series. Maybe I was a little burned out on sword and sorcery books at the time? At any rate, I didn’t read another Arion comic for seven years until I grabbed these four issues from the quarter bins on FCBD. I thought that if I read a few issues in a row, maybe I would find it more intriguing, especially since I’ve read more of the history/lore behind DC’s version of Atlantis (mostly through The Atlantis Chronicles by Peter David and Estaban Maroto).

These are from the back end of the run, which lasted 35 issues and a special. At this point in the story, our title character has been exiled from Atlantis to another dimension named Darkworld after a significant battle with a villain named Garn Daanuth (his brother, I think) and Atlantis is in chaos. He finds his way back and then has to face off against a demon brought to earth by a cult. The last issue of this pile is part two of a storyline called “The Magic Odyssey” that runs until issue #33. In that, Arion and his love, Lady Chian, travel to her homeland in Asia and she reunites with an old lover, but that guy is up to no good.

It was all intriguing. Paul Kupperberg’s writing is well-paced and he does a great job with the fantasy/sword and sorcery aspects of everything. The artwork is also great. At this point, the book’s main artist is Cara Sherman-Tereno, but the covers and a Lady Chian backup story is drawn by the original series artist Jan Duuresma, who has had a long career on sword and sorcery/fantasy books as well as the Star Wars franchise. Duursema does all the covers for this series and it’s all gorgeous.

Thankfully, this series is on the DC Infinite app in its entirety, so I don’t have to track it down the way I did Conan the King, so I’m going to put it in my queue over there. I may have to track down the issues of Warlord that had Arion’s first appearances in backup stories, but I am looking forward to this read.