Unusual Heroes: Sidney Mellon's Thunderskull! #1 (Slave Labor, 1989)

There are heroes, and then there is Thunderskull!...a hero that could only exist within the fantasies of young Sidney Mellon. A smart fellow, you might have caught Mellon's name within the columns of comic-book letter pages in the late 80's, spewing fanboy kitsch among the masses.

 Sidney Mellon

The story goes that Mellon approached Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones (The Trouble With Girls) at the San Diego Comic-con in 1987, and handed them a script entitled, "Sidney Mellon's Thunderskull!". The boy said, "I think it's important. For you, for me, and, mayhap, for the world". They read the story and were blown away. They recruited Chuck Austen and Norman Felchle to pencil the script, and the rest is history.

Witness the masterpiece of Sidney Mellon's Thunderskull! within these excerpts:

Absolutely epic, right?! I love the part where the dialogue between Thunderskull and Darkblood entirely fills the screen with word bubbles, obscuring the battle. It's also been awhile since I have seen such a duality with prose. We go from the cheesiness of the punks spewing silly threats, to the literary poetry of Thunderskull's thoughts. It's pure word magic.

But alas...if you haven't guessed by now, Sidney Mellon and his beloved Thunderskull idea is all just a parody made up by Jacobs and Jones. The kid simply doesn't exist. But mayhap, we surely wish he did.