All excited from my discovery of some truly hidden, unfairly forgotten comic gems of the 90s, I thought I’d give the ‘judging a book by its cover’ thing a further go with some more incredibly cheap #1 issues from the era.

Acclaim Comics had surprised me the most with their excellent Troublemakers series, and I thought it’d be cool to check out more of their titles from roughly the same time period.

When it came to Eternal Warriors: Time and Treachery #1, however, that tactic of basing my purchase on the cover, before investigating further, seems to have backfired.

The synopsis of the comic goes something like this: a supposed immortal is murdered, and a young guy named Archer is recruited to help find the killer.

Sounds simple, right? In fact, it’s anything but. Everything feels as if it’s being explained with a big mythology being built, but the whole thing is bafflingly obtuse and poorly told; as I had no clue who Archer was (one half of a famous comic book duo, Archer and Armstrong), his introduction just seems to come out of nowhere and his involvement made little sense to me.

Though not as bizarrely, incoherently slapped together as Malibu’s Raver #1, I really couldn’t get my head around what was going on in Eternal Champions: Time and Treachery #1. I won’t be investigating the follow up issues; this one confused the hell out of me, and I’m not convinced that further issues will suddenly make me interested in its convoluted story.