Superman #10

From the random stack of unread comics.

Title: Superman
Issue: #10
Date: October, 1987
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: John Byrne
Penciler: John Byrne
Inker: Karl Kesel
Colorist: Tom Ziuko
Letterer: John Costanza
Editor: Michael Carlin

From John Byrne's run on the rebooted Superman in the 1980s. This issue is actually from right around the time I started seriously collecting comics, although Superman wasn't one of the books I followed regularly back then.

Considering how "rebooted" this version of Superman was supposed to be, this issue had a surprisingly Silver Age vibe to it.

Clark Kent's powers go out of control one by one, while Lex Luthor watches on from afar, and Clark fears he's become a danger to Metropolis. And of course that's just the moment when a big robotic monster names Klaash attacks.

The story starts out looking like it is going to be the beginning of serious long-term problems for Clark, but then the whole thing gets resolved and wrapped up in a few pages, bringing everything back to status quo.

This makes this a fairly good self-contained issue, one that isn't going to lose new readers in a maze of continuity. But it also feels a bit anticlimactic when all is said and done.

Luthor has some good moments here, and Maggie Sawyer is excellent. Maggie is also the only character who really gets any plot action that extends beyond this story.

And there are a couple bits of fun comic relief early on when it's Clark's x-ray vision that's out of control.

Not a lot of depth, but a fun Superman story with an "old school" feel.

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