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