Space: 1999 #7

I bought two issues of this in 2013 at the South Attleboro Comic, Card, & Toy Show.

Title: Space: 1999
Issue: #7
Publisher: Charlton Comics
Date: November, 1976
Writer: Mike Pellowski
Artist: Pat Boyette

Cover: Pat Boyette
Editor: George Wildman

I reviewed the previous issue here.

This issue has two comic stories and a prose story, all focused on the character of Maya, the shapeshifter who was introduced in the second season of the TV show.

The first story adapts the episode "The Metamorph", the first TV appearance of Maya, as Commander Koenig and members of his crew are captured by Mentor, an alien with designs of feeding their mental energy to an ancient computer to restore his lost civilization. Maya, his daughter, ends up helping the Alphans escape and becomes a regular character on the show.

Even though it serves as Maya's origin story, it's Koenig who shines here as the commander forced to make the difficult decisions.

Maya is definitely the star of the second story in this issue, though. With Koenig and some other crew held hostage by a greedy tribe of reptilian aliens, Maya pretty much handles their rescue singlehandedly. The comics medium lets her show off a much wider range of shapshifting powers than she ever did on TV and this story makes it very clear that she is extremely capable and not someone you want to mess with.

The prose story read like a brief random encounter in a roleplaying campaign. Koenig and Maya land on a frozen planet, quickly discovering that the local life forms are not exactly friendly, and decide that discretion is the better part of valor. There really was not much in the way of plot, but it did serve as a nice "day in the life" segment, giving the reader a taste of the possibilities of what might be waiting out in space for the Alphans.

As a whole the book feels a bit choppy with no real continuity between the stories. The supporting cast doesn't get much attention, with almost all the focus on Koenig and Maya. I did like the character work on both of those characters. As far as how well it adapted the series, I think it got the flavor right, but it has been way too long and I watched way too few episodes to say for sure how faithful to the source material this comic was.

Rating: 6/10

Space: 1999 #6

Back for the new year! This is looking to be a busy year for me, so we'll so how long I can keep up with the reviews, but at least for now, I'm back in business. Here's one I picked up this past fall at the South Attleboro Comic, Card, & Toy Show. I bought two issues of this series, so look for another one soon. With all of that said, time to party like it's...

Title: Space: 1999
Issue: #6
Publisher: Charlton Comics
Date: September, 1976
Writer: John Byrne
Artist: John Byrne
Colorist: Wendy Fiore
Editor: George Wildman

Comic fans will find this an interesting historical volume, as it features some of John Byrne's early work. 

So, you need to get past the point that this story involves a guy getting ejected from his spaceship without a helmet and surviving long enough to retrieve a helmet and put it on. Yes, I am aware that this makes no sense at all, but I've seen other comics written in the 1970s that suggest that a human can survive and be functional for about 10 seconds or so unprotected in space, so it's at least not a unique gaffe.

This is based on the Space:1999 TV show, which I have vague memories of from my childhood. This comic seems to feature the first-season cast, which means no shapeshifting woman (*sadness*). The story here is essentially a space survival story, with an extensive prologue set hundreds of centuries in the past during a conflict between alien races.The prologue makes for a fun short story in and of itself, but really it just exists to set up a scenario where an explosion cripples one of the Eagle spaceships. Commander John Koenig and Mal Burns must find a way to survive the wreck and make it back to Moonbase Alpha.

This was wordy in the way that a lot of books from the 1970s are, and that is particularly true of the Charlton and Dell movie/TV tie-ins. The writing had a good old-school science fiction feel to it, though, and after suspending disbelief over the initial in-space-without-helmet bit, I found it to be a well-paced and fun adventure story with some nice little details to flesh out the characters. The opening prologue also had some good plot twists, and there was some fun playing around with scale of the kind that the Men In Black movies do very well.

There is a prose backup story, that comes off as a sort of slice-of-life on Moonbase Alpha, in which terrible peril is narrowly avoided in a story that really doesn't get enough time to develop a true plot.

Rating: 7/10