In the world of winter, wild tribes vie for territory and steal remnants of the previous civilization from each other. The Bear Tribe is one of the wildest; they live in the Pizza Hut Valley, in a large cabin named after their founder, the brave warrior Pizza Hut. Scully knows that the Bear Tribe is foolish, he knows that Pizza Hut was no hero, and that pizza was just something to eat. What Scully, the merchant, doesn't know is what that creature they called pizza looked like. A smart, acid script filled with dark humor and fast-paced action. Incredible, expressive drawings that are very much in tune with the action movies of the years in which they were created. Perhaps they didn't realize it while they were writing and drawing it, but Winterworld is the masterpiece of its creators, their significant contribution to the world of comics.
Chuck Dixon, a writer of Batman and other titles for DC and Marvel, collaborated with the Argentinian artist Jorge Zaffino to create this masterpiece called WinterWorld. It's a series of adventures set in a wintry world where we never find out what caused the freezing that turned the planet into an immense snowy plain. In this world, Scully, the unscrupulous merchant, is willing to infiltrate a prison that's a true hell and have his fingers cut off to rescue Wynn, a teenager. The two of them, along with a voracious badger named RahRah, traverse frozen steppes, facing nomadic and savage tribes that are unfamiliar with the world before the ice age and are determined to survive at any cost. Besides the excellent mastery of the human figure, Zaffino's use of white for dramatic purposes in this winter world is a unique case in comics. Winterworld is valuable as an apocalyptic story, an adventure series, and a tribute to friendship, excelling in all three aspects. Dixon creates a truly distressing world and writes brilliant dialogues for this series published by Eclipse Comics in 1988. It had a sequel, Wintersea, which remained unpublished for decades due to the sudden closure of Eclipse. The saga was intended to become a trilogy with an epic conclusion, Winterwar, but Zaffino's sudden death in 2002 halted the idea. Dixon had conceived these winter adventures to be drawn in the dark and aggressive style of the Argentinian artist and didn't want to find a substitute.
However, things changed in 2015. Winterworld was a type of comic that didn't fit into the comic market of the '90s. It wasn't a superhero series or an indie comic in the style of Fantagraphics. But today, its concept aligns well with what Dark Horse, Image, or IDW publish. IDW, in particular, released Winterworld and the previously unpublished Wintersea in a single volume and convinced Dixon to revisit the series with new artists, including Gerardo, Jorge Zaffino's son. There were changes; Dixon still had excellent ideas and maintained the ironic approach from the late '80s series. Now, Scully and Wynn encounter tribes that want to reverse the freezing effect by polluting the environment because that's what they understood from Al Gore's books. Scully and Wynn become less brutal over time as they find books and try to better understand the world that preceded them. The series loses its aggressiveness and adds color, which perhaps makes it more commercial but diminishes the impact of the stark original concept conceived by Zaffino. In its new 21st-century era, Winterworld, which has now published more pages than the original series, doesn't reach the level of its predecessor but is still better than almost everything published these days.
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