The Barren Earth by Gary Cohn & Ron Randall

Throughout its run, DC Comics’ The Warlord – created by Mike Grell – was the anchor of the publisher’s fantasy books. It also meant a number of new fantasy series were carried in its back pages. In No. 63, The Barren Earth debuted and appeared in most issues until No. 88. It continued in a four-issue mini series Conqueror of the Barren Earth.

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been seen since, either in new comics or a collected edition. Which is too bad, because it has a strong female lead – ahead of its time there – and a novel premise.

So here’s a small celebration of it, taking two pieces of its original art and giving it the modern packaging treatment.

And remember, never neck with a Mulge.

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THE WHO’S WHO IN THE DC UNIVERSE ENTRY

As published.

Original art scan from Heritage Auctions.

This second piece is an overlay used to print the red outline background in the published version.

Before and After. Here the two pieces are matched up. The overlay would be added manually to the yellow and magenta plates (yellow + magenta = red) in a pre-digital workflow.

New colour version. In a digital workflow, we put the overlay on a separate layer in Photoshop or another image editing program, but it doesn’t need to be treated as one object. It can be split up any way we want to. In this example, the heads get a dark red outline, the sun gets a yellow edge, and the floating city gets a pale blue. Technically, this could have been accomplished in the older workflow, but would have involved a fair bit of manual labour for each page in the comic. So by standardising on one colour per background, they were doing something special, but it kept production costs defined and manageable.

Text re-set and page design re-created.

Art reformatted – floating heads removed, the Sun enlarged and re-positioned – to make it suitable for cover design.

It certainly would be nice to have a collection of The Barren Earth stories – plus maybe some new tales – and I’d love to do the colouring and design of the omnibus. DC, call me.

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A PAGE FROM WARLORD NO. 80

As published.

Original art scan from Heritage Auctions.

Minor clean-up on the art.

A second version of the lineart for cover design, with art filled in and extended in Randall’s style.

I did this new colour version first.

New cover formatting, as if the story had appeared in its own comic.

This second colour version was fitted into the original panel, and then the other pieces were coloured in around it.