Skartaris

Skartaris
Skartaris map from The Warlord Annual #4 (1985) Art by Pat Broderick and Bob Smith
Notable characters	The Warlord Machiste Shakira Deimos
First appearance	1st Issue Special #8 (November 1975)
Publisher	DC Comics

Skartaris is a fictional Hollow Earth fantasy setting created by Mike Grell for the sword and sorcery comic book The Warlord, published by DC Comics. Skartaris debuted in 1st Issue Special #8 (November 1975), where the character Travis Morgan, a U.S. Air Force pilot, discovers a passage into this world through the Earth's North Pole. Subsequent to that first issue, the Warlord series tells of Morgan's adventures in Skartaris.

According to Mike Grell, creator of Skartaris and The Warlord, "the name comes from the mountain peak Scartaris that points the way to the passage to the earth’s core in Journey to the Center of the Earth."

While Grell never drew a map of Skartaris during his tenure on the book, one was created towards the end of the original volume's run, and the illustration appeared in The Warlord Annual #4 (1985). In an interview from Comic Scene in 1983, he says: "I did things like moving my character around the countryside; I never drew a map so I could move him from one side of Skartaris to the other just for the sake of the story." In a later interview with Comic Book Resources Grell said, "Anything that can happen in fantasy happens in the lore and it’s one of the reasons I always refused to draw a map of Skartaris. Year after year after year went by, and I was always hounded by the editors, 'When are you going to have a map?' The reason I refused was because once you draw a map, you establish boundaries. And why would you want to put boundaries on your imagination?"

Skartaris is essentially a translation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Pellucidar into the graphic medium, with elements of Jules Verne and half a dozen other fictional Hollow Earth settings, and the admixture of magic and the Atlantis myth. In Grell's concept, as in Burroughs', the Earth is a hollow shell with Skartaris as the internal surface of that shell. Skartaris is accessible to the surface world via a polar opening allowing passage between the inner and outer worlds. There are also various tunnels connecting the interior world with the surface. Skartaris is lit by a miniature sun suspended at the center of the hollow sphere, so it is perpetually overhead wherever one is in Skartaris. The miniature sun never changes in brightness, and never sets; so with no night or seasonal progression, the natives have little concept of time. There is however, a "moon" that orbits the sun in a random way, resulting in certain areas of Skartaris being covered in darkness from time to time. The events of the series suggest that time is elastic, passing at different rates in different areas of Skartaris and varying even in single locales.