TALES FROM THE KRYPTONIAN: It's Freedom Fighting Friday with SOJOURN

Friday, April 24, 2026

It's Freedom Fighting Friday with SOJOURN

As attentive visitors may have noticed CROSSGEN WEEK has been delayed and the reason is that Yesterday was Saint Jordi which apparently is a holiday around these parts which means that the help didn't come and we went out to eat at a chinese restaurant so instead of writing this post I went over the last of my old bookmarks. So this was supposed to go up Yesterday but now we are finally going to dive headfirst into SOJOURN which has often been compared to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord Of The Rings.

Now while I personally think the story is more akin to The Silmarillion I can understand why most people mention The Lord Of The Rings since that is the book - or better trilogy of books - everybody knows especially after the wonderful adaptions by Peter Jackson. If they do another work by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien it's probably The Hobbit which some people view as inferior since it was written as a children's book and most people aren't even aware that there have been previous adaptions of Tolkien's work be it in live action or animated from. And don't get me started on the few translations into comicbooks before the Peter Jackson movies.

That said I can live with the comparison with The Lord Of The Rings as that is mental shorthand what you want to transmit to potential readers and that is always better with a concept they are already familiar with.

And it has a lot of elements that you can find in The Lord Of The Rings like an evil entity with magic powers trying to take over the world, lots of fugly orcs ( I wouldn't be surprised if the artists who designed the orcs for the movies took some inspiration from Greg Land's artwork ), plucky freedom fighters who band together more by happenstance and necessity than by design to oppose the forces of evil, an honest to jove freakin dragon and of course a very capable bow slinger although in this case we have a female archer who is the main character of the series.

Like was a staple of CrossGen Comics they put the women front and center and let's be honest, a big part of the selling point of SOJOURN is Greg Land's masterful depiction of the female form. Like I've mentioned before one big reason why CrossGen Comics became so successful so fast was that a lot of artists did their best work there and many had leaps in quality like Greg Land who was already known as a babe artist on books like BIRDS OF PREY ( where has was followed by Jackson Guice and one day I will have to write a post about that ) but it was here n SOJOURN where he went from that artist who draws women really well to the Greg Land we all know and love who uses pictures of supermodels as a reference for his artwork. And whether you like it or not it all started here so that is not as out of hands as it would become in later years.

But that also posed a dilemma because naturally I wanted to showcase Greg Land's beautiful women but on the other side I always try to include as much original art in my BLACK AND WHITE showcases and as you may have deducted by now these two fields don't overlap a lot on this book.

So my options were either include all of the original artwork I could find even if that meant that the pages would be from different issues with huge gaps and I would have to leave out a lot of pages that show why SOJOURN was so popular especially with adolescent boys who were not old enough to buy adult magazines. The other option was to include the best of the breast Greg Land has to offer in this series and leave a lot of the original artwork for later posts. Now guess which option I went for.