Storm #10

History

By 1983, the Storm strip had run nine albums of largely self-contained adventure set in the 'Deep World' — a future Earth whose oceans had receded — with a rotating pool of writers. Martin Lodewijk, who had co-created the series with British artist Don Lawrence for Dutch publisher Oberon and written the second album back in 1979, returned for album #10 with a deliberate structural overhaul: he relocated Storm and his companion Roodhaar to an entirely new cosmological setting and introduced recurring antagonists to give the long-running series the narrative coherence it had previously lacked. Lodewijk would remain the sole writer from album #10 through to the final Lawrence-illustrated album (#22, 2001), creating what critics recognise as the definitive creative partnership of the series. The album was serialised in weekly black-and-white instalments in the Dutch comics magazine Eppo before being compiled into a full-colour hardcover album by Oberon.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Title: De piraten van Pandarve (The Pirates of Pandarve); Storm series #10; published 1983 by Oberon, Haarlem, Netherlands.
• Writer: Martin Lodewijk; Artist: Don Lawrence — their first sustained collaboration since album #2 (1979), a partnership that would continue until Lawrence's death in 2003.
• First appearance of Nomad — a hairless, red-skinned powerhouse who Storm meets as a fellow slave in the water-mines of a Pandarve daughter-world and who becomes a core cast member for the rest of the series.
• First appearance of Marduk, the Theocrat of Pandarve — the saga's primary antagonist, who seeks Storm because Storm's time-displacement makes him a cosmological anomaly capable of granting Marduk dominion over the multiverse.
• First instalment of De kronieken van Pandarve (The Chronicles of Pandarve), the second and longer of the two main story arcs, spanning albums 10–22.
• The story marks a genre shift: the Deep World arc was science-fantasy grounded in a ruined Earth; the Pandarve arc is full space-opera, set in a breathable-gas multiverse surrounding a living sentient planet whose normal physical laws do not apply.
• Album format: 48 pages, full colour, approximately 22 × 28 cm, published in both softcover and hardcover editions; the series was serialised first in the Dutch weekly magazine Eppo in black-and-white.
• English translation published as part of Storm: The Collection, a 12-volume deluxe hardcover series produced between 2005 and 2012 by the Don Lawrence Collection; The Pirates of Pandarve appears in Collection volumes four and five.

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