The World Below

The World Below is an underground land that exists at the hollow center of the Earth in the ID comics universe. The World Below was first introduced in the silver age comic 'Sicarii', when the android crime fighter was thrown down a volcano in a fight with the Terror Troupe. His ultrametal exterior unharmed by the intense heat, Sicarii emerged in a primeval underworld. There he discovered a land of the lost, filled with animals long thought extinct, such as the dinosaurs. Eventually, he discovered a roving band of what appeared to be huge, mis-shapen humans. When he tried to greet them, the creatures attacked Sicarii. They captured the android and took him to a huge palace, carved of obsidian. There he was brough before Ria, the brutal Sorceror-King of the land, who reveals his monsterous servants are natives of the land he has captured and magically mutated. Sicarii managed to escape from the palace's jail, and in the jungle he stumbled upon a settlement that resembled an Old West boomtown. This was the town of Gunpowder, California, the setting of the 1942-1955 ID comics series 'Western Comics', which abruptly ended with no conclusion. The author of the story states that Gunpowder collapsed inside the earth during an earthquake, and fell down to the World Below. There, it's citizens allied with the natives who were resisting Ria, and their modern descendents use a mixture of Old-West-esque steam technology and tribal weapons (not to mention their dinosaur mounts, in lieu of horses). At the end of the 'Sicarii' issue, the android was teleported back to the surface by Ria, as an attack by the Gunpowder Resistance closed in on the palace.

Although the concept of the World Below was originally not supposed to extend outside this single issue, it was later used by other authors, and has become an integral part of the ID universe. King Ria is a recurring villain, and the Gunpowder Resistance continues to this day.