Skullkickers comics

In September 2024 we presented the Skullkickers Bundle featuring the rowdy fantasy-comedy comic book series Skullkickers by Jim Zub, Edwin Huang, and Misty Coats.

Skullkickers stars hard-headed mercenaries Rolf Copperhead and Rex Maraud, who kill monsters and cause havoc in their endless search for money, fame, and adventure. The twisted trail Rolf and Rex follow, sometimes alongside the knife-happy elven merc Kusia, brings troubles aplenty: patchwork zombies, bloodthirsty faerie folk, pirate crews, giant rain weevils, a neat-freak Goo Elemental, cross-dimensional bar fights, and the Deep Thool, among many other perils. For lovers of fantasy, action comedy, ridiculous violence, and the kicking of many skulls – for every tabletop roleplayer who likes a good hack-and-slash adventure – Skullkickers is The Witcher by way of Deadpool. And gamers will enjoy the prefaces to these collected volumes by Robin D. Laws, Steve Jackson, Tracy Hickman, and other RPG luminaries.

Writer Jim Zub’s bibliography includes runs on a hundred different comics titles from Avengers and Invincible Iron Man through Legends of the Dark Knight and Samurai Jack to Onyx Path’s Exalted one-shot comic “Tale of the Visiting Flare,” Dynamite’s Pathfinder comic, Conan the Barbarian for both Marvel and current licensee Titan Comics, and many D&D miniseries for IDW: Shadows of the Vampire (2015), Legends of Baldur’s Gate (2016), Frost Giant’s Fury (2017), Evil at Baldur’s Gate (2018), Infernal Tides (2019), Mindbreaker (2021), Fortune Finder (2023), and more. But Zub started with Skullkickers – “the foundation of my creative career” – and it remains his longest run on any title. Skullkickers was “my own creative crucible, where I learned how to open myself up to new ideas, push through my fears, and carry through on my professional commitments. It’s a rambling and childish yarn inspired by tabletop RPGs and the fantasy stories I grew up on, but it’s also a representation of me in the here and now as a creator.”

Skullkickers is a joyous (and gory!) fantasy buddy comedy with action, humor, and two engaging lead characters, whom Zub dubs “dunderheaded death dealers.” In an appendix to the tenth-anniversary volume, Caster Bastards and the Great Grotesque, as a guide to aid Dungeon Masters in establishing the proper tone for the included 170-page D&D 5E adventure, Zub analyzed the elements of the comic’s humor:

Blue-collar fantasy: These monster-mashing mercs have no time for glory or epic heroism; they’re just doing a job.
Blustering heroes who are oblivious to their weaknesses but somehow able to persevere despite themselves.
“Wonderment served with cynicism.”
Large groups are always dumber: Whenever there’s a mob of people or creatures in Skullkickers, they get collectively dumber. Mob mentality takes over every time.
Bureaucracy is everywhere, and it sucks.
Magic is unknowable and awful.
Big tropes gone wrong: The downtrodden village, the frozen north, the pirate ship, the jungle, the wizard school – Skullkickers undercuts these familiar places and ideas in unexpected ways.
Cute things are scary, and scary things are awkward: Faerie folk are terrifying tiny murderers with sickly sweet names; unicorns are savage berserkers; hideous monsters have mundane jobs or feel out of place. And they all act like this is perfectly normal.
Slapstick + gross is good.
Cool moments do not last.
The main characters are capable, not invulnerable.
Persistence is stupid, yet also courageous.

Sounds like your own campaign, no? But for all the series’ farcical humor, Zub cautions against parody, breaking the fourth wall, and meta-commentary on RPG mechanics. “Skullkickers stories vaguely feel like a runaway fantasy RPG where our players/heroes aren’t following the plot, but there is never any game terminology or game aspects in-world. No one openly talks about Hit Points or Armor Class. Magic items don’t have bonuses carved into them. It’s not that kind of self-aware comedy.”