Rook (comics)

The Rook
The Return of an American Legend. Dark Horse Comics cover art by Paul Gulacy; new stories by Steven Grant.
Publication information
Publisher	Dark Horse Comics
First appearance	Eerie #82 (March 1977)
Created by	W.B. DuBay AKA Bill DuBay
In-story information
Alter ego	Restin Dane
Team affiliations	The Time Force, The Infinity Force, Danse Macabre
Abilities	time travel

The Rook is a fictional, time-traveling comic book adventure hero created by Warren Publishing who first appeared in March 1977. He first appeared in Warren Publishing's Eerie, Vampirella & Warren Presents magazines. In the 1980s, the Rook became popular and gained his own comic magazine title of the same name, The Rook Magazine. In the 1990s, The Rook would be recreated in Harris Comics’ Chains of Chaos and The Rook comic book series. In 2014, The Rook was re-introduced in Dark Horse Comics’ Eerie Archives 17. The Rook returns with new adventures, written by Steven Grant and illustrated by Paul Gulacy in Dark Horse Presents and The Rook comic book series in 2015.

The Rook was created by Bill DuBay and Budd Lewis during the dawn of Sci-Fi’s Modern Age and was influenced by pulp magazines’ heroic characters like Doc Savage.

Scientific industrialist Restin Dane has a penchant for dressing as an old west gun-slinger as he travels through time. Restin Dane is the grandson of Adam Dane, the man who told his story about those adventures in the future to his friend H. G. Wells, who turned his account into the book The Time Machine, but at Dane's insistence withheld his name.

Restin Dane’s time machine is the Time Castle, a dark-energy powered vehicle that resembles a large rook chess piece; which is how Restin became known as The Rook. The Time Castle was created by Restin, with help from his grandfather’s, Adam Dane’s (the original Time Traveler*3) journals. Restin is no stranger to the space-time continuum either; having an undergraduate degree from Oxford in Engineering Science and Physics and a PhD from Caltech in both Materials Science and Applied Physics-Quantum Mechanics. While at Oxford, he discovered artificial intelligence with his creation of two sanitation robots, Nuts & Bolts. Restin would later create a more complex robotic servant known as MAN-RS, an acronym for Man’s Robotic Servant. The Rook’s journeys through time reveal the illusion of human history and the separation between past, present and future.

Early in 1976, many of Warren Publication’s content was geared towards vampires, zombies and the sort. Jim Warren wanted to do create the next big craze. Although he had been captivated by Superman in his youth, his real fascination was the adventure more than the superhero characters themselves. For this project, Warren enlisted Bill DuBay and Howard Peretz. Peretz had created children’s toys for large toy manufacturers, while DuBay had stepped down earlier that year as editor from Warren magazines. Jim wanted a cowboy and Bill realized that his goals were no easy task since Westerns appeared to be a passé genre. Peretz eagerly agreed with Warren suggesting that Mattel could pull out their old toy molds from the 50s. Bill however was not as thrilled with the idea since it was he that would have to create the future from the past. Bill and his creative partner, Budd Lewis eventually conceived of a modern man in search of his roots, setting the story arc for the inaugural series in the old west. This would satisfy Jim and allow them the flexibility to serialize every great adventure trapped in time. The character would also be an inventor of robotic artificial intelligence, traveling through time as a swashbuckler of sorts. DuBay enlisted Jim Stenstrum, whom he considered the best writer that he had worked with. Bill and Jim would establish the first storylines that would thrust the Rook’s adventures into the forefront of the reader’s imaginations. Jim would design The Rook’ costume in all black attire and the character was born.