Men of the Legion Part One

Men of the Legion
Part One
Alfredo Grassi (story) and Alberto Salinas (art)
from Merchants of Death, Eclipse Comics
Issue No. 3, October 1988

Reader Tom Dulski asked for these two stories from Merchants of Death to be posted here to the PorPor Books Blog.

Eclipse editor and publisher Catherine Yronwode provided no information in either issue 3 nor issue 4 of Merchants of Death as to the origin of 'Men of the Legion'. I had to do some Google digging to discover that the strips originally appeared in 1975, as a comic published in Spain (?), called Hombres de la Legion. 

Argentinian artist Salinas (1932 - 2005) provided exemplary art for comics publishers in Europe and the UK during the 60s, 70s, and 80s. You can get a sense of just how talented Salinas was by his depiction of the quasi-psychotic Sergeant Lebrun (then again, what French Foreign NCO isn't psychotic ?) in this particular panel. Art of this caliber is quite rare in contemporary comics, that's for sure.

Salinas's penmanship for these stories is compromised the low-res reproduction in the original Merchants of Death magazines, and I've had to increase the contrast on the scans to try and improve things.

Part One is below; Part Two will be the following post.