TITLE: Comics Greatest World: X – Week 18
YEAR: July 1993
COMPANY: Dark Horse Comics
Script by Mike Richardson (Prologue Sequence), Jerry Prosser (Main Story)
Art: Lee Weeks (Prologue Sequence)
Pencils: Chris Warner
Inks: Tim Broadstreet
Letters: Clem Robins
Colors: Matthew Hollingsworth
Logo Design: Scott Tice
Cover: Frank Miller
Inside Back Cover: Randall M. Green, Gary Martin
Editors: Barbara Kesel, Jennie Bricker
Back in 1993, Dark Horse Comics’ Team CGW created an imprint known as “Comics’ Greatest World”.
Conceived back in 1990, the planning for this new world would take three years until the line was released.
This was during the time independents started their own imprint and world of superheroes as Malibu Comics had done with Ultraverse and the success of Valiant Comics, Dark Horse wanted to capitalize on the speculator mania of that time.
As these stories would take place in four cities: Arcadia, Golden City, Steel Harbor and Cinnibar Flats (Nevada), to introduce this shared universe, Dark Horse Comics released four weekly limited series introducing characters and the cities they are from.
Unfortunately, “Comics’ Greatest World” didn’t last too long and in 1995, the imprint was renamed to “Dark Horse Heroes”.
But the two titles that did well from this shared universe was “X” and “Ghost”.
“X” was a hero first introduced in “Dark Horse Comics” issue #8 and his own series would be released in February 1994 and ended with issue #25 in 1996. While it ended in ’96, Dark Horse relaunched with issue #0 in April 2013.
In this issue, we see a UFO flying across the skies in North America in 1931 and shooting an energy beam and burying itself in the Earth and disappearing.
We then see present time Arcadia, a masked man known as X jumps out of a building and as police arrive, we see a man dead with his chest blasted open. As X jumps out the building, he manages to maneuver himself back into a building window and police and SWAT Team go after him.
As he fights his way out against the police, two individuals materialize who are tracking a signature of “The Fallen One”.
For the most part, these $1 issues of “Comics’ Greatest World” are short comic books just mainly to give people a taste of a character and the city they are in. No doubt, this short story showed us a really cool anti-hero vigilante with wonderful artwork and a cool story, even if it’s a small taste of the comic series that was yet to come.
And I have to say, “X” was one of the coolest characters conceived in the ’90s for Dark Horse Comics and I look forward to see how this character continues on in the future.