The Rook was created by Bill DuBay and Budd Lewis, and was influenced by pulp magazines’ heroic characters like Doc Savage.

[1] Scientific industrialist Restin Dane has a penchant for dressing as an Old West gun-slinger as he travels through time.

The Rook's journeys through time reveal the illusion of human history and the separation between past, present and future.

Since The Rook's last documented appearance in the early 1980s, he has undergone significant changes: he now travels the reality stream in a different ship.

Jim wanted a cowboy and Bill realized that his goals were no easy task since Westerns appeared to be a passé genre.

Bill and his creative partner, Budd Lewis eventually conceived of a modern man in search of his roots, setting the story arc for the inaugural series in the old west.

Bill and Jim would establish the first storylines that would thrust the Rook's adventures into the forefront of the reader's imaginations.

In February, as a matter of federal mandate, circulation statements would be issued for the first and final time for all Warren titles; The Rook turned out to be Warren Publications' most popular title, followed by Creepy, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Eerie and Vampirella.

The Rook's adventures were also syndicated in 24 countries, in many languages, from the mid-seventies to the early nineties in Ediciones Delta's Dossier Negro and Delta magazines throughout Spain and Europe, Ekim's Vampirella in Turkey, Ibero Mundial de ediciones Rufus magazine throughout South America and in Eura Editoriale's Skorpio in Italy.

The following year, Mike Mignola, Tom Sniegoski, and Kirk Van Wormer teamed up for a five-part comic book miniseries, The Rook.

From September 2015 to January 2016 a four-issue mini-series of The Rook was published by Dark Horse, written by 2Guns creator Steven Grant and illustrated by Paul Gulacy.

A press release described the series with "Seeking his roots, a time traveling adventurer stumbles across history’s darkest secret, Quarb: an immortal genius who has terrorized and shaped human culture since the dawn of man.

Though seriously outgunned he begins a lone guerrilla war across time, in pasts unheard of and futures undreamed off, to free humanity from the immortal’s unending grip.