Jackson "Butch" Guice left Micronauts to work with Bill Mantlo on the space pirates series "Swords of the Swashbucklers" for Epic Comics. He designed a whole alien pirate crew including a giant mantis, a talking cat, and a deck-full of more traditional freebooters. Their leader was the dashing pirate queen Captain Raader, who like all "good pirates" engaged in constant looting of an Evil Empire.

I didn't encounter any of the Epic series until longer after the fact. This one came my way in the form of Dynamite's hardback reprint. I got some pages from Geoff Isherwood, who had assumed art duties after Guice moved to the new X-Factor series. Then I saw Guice on a livestream interview and noticed that he had a Terry and the Pirates Sunday strip hanging in his office. Turns out he's a lifelong fan of the pirate genre. So when an opportunity arose to commission Guice, Captain Raader made a natural choice for my request. This was one of the last batch of commissions Guice completed before his untimely death in May 2025.

On this cover-style commission, Raader leads her crew into action, blade in each hand as she holds a rope ladder, preparing to board an enemy vessel. A "worm's eye" perspective makes the main subject seem more imposing. Guice always portrayed Raader as a supermodel of an action star, and this version is no exception. Explosions light up the galactic vista behind her, rendered with a combination of ink wash and white paint. As seen in the series, her tattered Jolly Roger has a rose in its teeth. The cannon barely visible in the lower left corner has been cast in the shape of a monstrous head. The pirate in the foreground and bottom right has claws and chitinous plates on his arms.

I have one of Guice's first versions of this character from the mid 1980s, and it's interesting to see how his style started rather Byrne-like and has become more illustrative and realistic over time.

Social/Sharing