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

Superman #269

I love finding inexpensive silver/bronze age comics at the various shows I go to. I picked this one up at the South Attleboro Collectibles Show a couple of weeks ago.

Title: Superman
Issue: 269
Date: November 1973
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Cary Bates
Artist: Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson
Editor: Julius Schwartz

Evil circus own BB Farnum (no, really) creates seven Superman puppets each one with the ability to steal one of Superman's powers.

Meanwhile Clark Kent picks up an assignment from Morgan Edge to do an in-depth story about a local sports hero who's a bit of an egotistical jerk. While Clark enjoyed showing up the dumb jock with some sneaky application of superpowers, the puppets begin their work of stripping those very powers away.

The story, although a bit slow in its pacing, does a nice job of showing how Superman remains a hero as his powers diminish, even taking on Farnum and the super-puppets in a seemingly unwinnable final battle.

In the end, we get to see Superman bust out that most classic of Silver Age powers: The super-ventriloquism! Totally makes the ridiculously contrived ending worth it! Gotta love the super-ventriloquism!

I'll also add that the cover is absolutely awesome.

Rating: 7/10

Sandman #5

Title: Sandman
Issue: 5
Date: November 1975
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Michael Fleisher
Artist: Jack Kirby, Mike Royer
Editor: Joe Orlando

An old fisherman and his grandson are out on the ocean when a sea monster attacks. The Sandman, looking on from his Dream Dome (No,really! In case you didn't notice the date, this is not Neil Gaiman's Sandman; this is the original!), arrives in time to save apprentice fisherman Jed, but not his grandfather.

Cue the arrival of the evil family members. Jed's aunt and uncle could use some help around the farm, and Jed's bully cousins are in need of a new victim. Jed is soon living a life much like Harry Potter before the Hogwarts invitation, but when he falls asleep on the wood-chopping job, he finds himself in Sandman's dreamscape, fighting alongside his hero to defend an island of cute winged folk against an army of invading... Well, they kinda resembled bully wigs from D&D.

Jed even gets to use his fishing knowledge to help save the day.

Nothing in this story is particularly subtle, least of all Jack Kirby's artwork, but it still manages to be entertaining, with a reasonable logical flow, fun scenes at the right moments, and a sprinkle of surrealism from the King.

Rating: 7/10

Action Comics #421

Here's an oddity from the 1970s that I picked up today at the South Attleboro Collectibles Show, which capped off my attending four conventions in eight days (Queen City Kamikaze, Boskone, Totalcon, South Attleboro Collectibles Show).

Title: Action Comics
Issue: 421
Date: February 1973
Publisher: DC Comics
Writer: Cary Bates, Elliot Maggin
Artist: Curt Swan, Murphy Anderson, Sal Amendola, Dick Giordano
Editor: Julius Schwartz

Let me guess? This is a tribute, right? Or maybe it's just a coincidence that Superman happens to be going up against a bald musclebound sailor who just happens to gain super strength by eating a special green vegetable? No, really, it's called "sauncha" (hey, that is several letters off from spinach!).

Interestingly, when you google "sauncha", the first entry that comes up is Wikipedia's page on "Captain Strong".

The story is also a bit on the mean-spirited side in the sense that sauncha affects Captain Strong as an addictive drug. He's well-intentioned, and presented as more of a victim than a bad guy, but it was still an unexpected tack if the intention was to pay tribute to Popeye. And it was played a bit too seriously for it to be treated as a spoof.

The story itself is pretty straightforward. Superhero fanboy Billy Anders is trapped in a collapsed building. When the door is busted in, he expects Superman to be the one to rescue him. Instead, it's Captain Strong. Billy tells the story to Clark Kent, while Strong tries to make a deal to sell the secret of his mysterious sauncha vegetable to a greedy businessman. When the food executive tries to doublecross the sailor, Captain Strong shows up looking for revenge (and amped up on a sauncha overdose). Superman arrives and it is ON.

Lots of Silver-Age goofiness, including silly identity-concealing tricks by Clark Kent.

With the weird Popeye ripoff going on, this had me scratching my head more than anything else. It is certainly an interesting curiosity piece.

The backup story featured Green Arrow. Dinah Lance is getting set to open her new flower shop ("Pretty Bird Flower Shoppe"; sorry, guys, "Sherwood Florist" was a much better name). After meeting an obnoxious press agent while saving a theater audience from a forest, Oliver Queen decides that he might just have a future as a publicist. After all, he can out-obnoxious just about anyone. So he promises Dinah that he's going to get her shop on the front page of the local paper.

Then he just has to figure out how to do it. The answer comes in the form of a fugitive mob hitman. All Ollie needs to do is to make sure he apprehends the criminal in exactly the right place.

This is a light story where not much really goes wrong. The action is secondary to the romantic comedy vibe between Dinah and Ollie, which is pretty amusing. It helps that Dinah is gorgeous, in spite of her appearing only in small panels on a couple of pages. It also helps that she's not buy into any of Ollie's attempts to turn on the charm.

Trick Arrow Count: Net arrow, bugging device arrow, siren arrow. Ollie also uses one regular arrow. You know, the pointy kind. Sadly, no boxing glove arrow.

Good backup story and a historically interesting (if only in the "how could this not have resulted in a lawsuit?" sense) main story.

Rating: 6.5/10