Magnus Robot Fighter 4000AD

Raw Steel

Magnus Robot Fighter 4000AD
(The Gold Key and Whitman Years)
Gold Key Issues 1 - 46 USA 1963 - 1977
Whitman Issues Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom
Back Up Strip 28 - 31 1981 - 1982

I never read or, I think, even saw these Magnus Robot Fighter 4000AD comics when I was a kid. We certainly had a few of the Gold Key titles on the UK news stands back in the early 1970s but they were mostly titles like Lost In Space, Boris Karloff Presents or Star Trek and, even those were fairly scarce among the gazillions of DC, Marvel and Harvey comics which dominated the racks here. The few Gold Key titles which were here did tend to stand out, though, because the fully painted covers were absolutely brilliant compared to any of the rival companies mentioned above.

That being said, I did read at least one Magnus comic strip and I was interested in the character because of that. The strip in question was from a second hand TV Tornado annual I had somehow acquired in the 1970s. TV Tornado was a comic that I didn’t get or know about but I somehow had an annual and the Magnus strip I read when I was a nipper would have been, like all the Magnus strips included as part of that comic, a reprint from one of these Gold Key issues. The look and feel of the character, from what little I saw, really appealed to me but, obviously, those were the decades before the internet so any information about the character was really not forthcoming like it would be today.

But now I’ve read these, I am a little more clued up on him... at least from his original Gold Key era. Like a couple of other of the ‘original’ Gold Key characters, Magnus has had a longer life after the company folded in various other comic companies over the years and, I guess I’ll get around to reading those ones too at some point. These ones though are... kinda interesting but a very simplistic presentation of a complex issue, it seems to me.

The strip was created by famous comic artist Russ Manning, who would also work on titles like Tarzan and who would be also well known in the US in his later years, just before he lost his battle with cancer, for drawing the Star Wars newspaper strip. He drew the first 21 issues of the Gold Key title until other artists took over for issues 23 - 28 and also the short lived revival as a back up strip in the revived Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom (which I reviewed here). Manning’s art is pretty clean and you can tell from his storyline that he was obviously interested by the challenge of Isaac Asimov’s famous Three Laws of Robotics. So much so that he even quotes it in the first issue. Another sign of a good artist is the fact that the page layouts don’t ‘strictly’ follow the Gold Key style of panel counts with more dynamic layouts and splash panels/pages which Manning throws into the mix.

Issues 29 - 46 are all, regrettably, reprints of earlier issues... I’ve got no idea how Gold Key got away with pulling stuff like this off but I think they got rid of the letters page around about the same time so there was nobody complaining about it. At least not visibly.

The first issue tells of Magnus’ first day in North Am, a vast city which unites all of the North American continent in the year 4000AD (and beyond). This is an origin story and tells how he was rescued as an orphaned baby by the robot 1A, who took him to his ocean lair and trained him, as a toddler, in the arts of robot fighting... allowing young Magnus to hone his body like steel so he can smash robots with his bare hands. On this day in the first issue, Magnus must be in his early 20s and he returns to North Am to enlighten mankind that they have come to rely on robots too heavily... turning them into a weak race. So he fights any evil or malfunctioning robots, falls in love with a senator’s daughter who is a regular on the strip, never lets anyone know that he has a receiver implanted in his head so he can pick up transmissions between robots and get a jump on any alarming activity... and is somehow welcomed into the hearts of the people and the upper echelons of North Am, without having much of an actual job to sustain him other than being, it would seem, a permanent ‘live in guest’ of the senator and smashing bad robots.

So, yeah, interesting premise of a world gone weak through over reliance on robots but brushed away in a simplistic strip which, I suspect, Russ Manning probably left because he’d realised it had run its course in such a short time. After all, how many evil robots can there be?

There are recurring villains from time to time, mostly humans controlling robots of death... but things get fairly ridiculous quite quickly with not much to add to the initial concept, I felt. Not that the writers didn’t give it a try. For instance, exploring the concept of highly intelligent, telepathic animals to try and expand out the narrative or even... and this is a bit fraught with peril... having a group of what amount to a fan club of teenage sidekicks called The Outsiders to get into trouble and, just occasionally, get Magnus out of harm’s way.

But then you also get stuff like the mental consciousness of a robot planet that Magnus destroyed in an earlier issue coming back to take over two of the title character’s human enemies by thought control and having them harnessing robots through the power of black magic... it just gets a bit silly. There’s even a hollow reference or two in that particular issue to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos if you look carefully at the spells they are chanting.

The comic also had a back up strip called The Aliens which was fairly unfocused and tried to preach on the subject of racial tensions dressed up as a kind of aliens/human exchange programme.. but with lots of ‘problem solving’ action. However, the strip wasn’t that great and it kinda gets cancelled half way through the run on a cliff hanger so... I guess I’ll never know (not too worried about that, to be honest).

So yeah, when it does have good things to explore, such as the anti-robot sentiment operating through a robotic society or the different classes and status of the inhabitants of North Am, it does kind of throw them away so we can see more things involving Magnus smashing robots but, to be fair, it is entertaining enough and I am wondering if the later incarnations of the character, written and drawn in decades which were a little more sophisticated than the comics audience was in the 1960s/70s, had time to look at some of the more interesting side effects of the main premise than the original comic did. I guess I will have to get around to reading some of those at some point in the near future but, for now, I’ll just say that I did kinda enjoy perusing the adventures of Magnus Robot Fighter 4000AD and I will come back to this character at some point, I’m sure.

UFO Flying Saucers

Close Encounters
Of The Gold Key

Flying Saucers (Dell)
5 issues April 1967 - October 1969

UFO Flying Saucers (Gold Key)
13 issues October 1968 - January 1977 continuing as...
 
UFO And Outer Space (Gold Key)
12 issues June 1978 - February 1980

I thought there used to be a TV show which was on reruns in the very early 1970s, when I was a kid, about Project Blue Book. I’m pretty sure it was a 1960s TV programme but, looking up the info on both the shows Project Blue Book and Project UFO gives me listings on productions which aired in the late 1970s. So I’m really not sure which show I was thinking of, to be honest.

Either way, I was very interested in UFOs as a kid but never saw any of the comics I’m going to talk about today. Starting with DELL Comics’ five issues of Flying Saucers which were basically short stories telling tales which seemed to be a fusion of reported UFO incidents and flights of fancy. These aren’t great and I only found out about this run halfway through reading the Gold Key comics resurrection of the title. When their partnership with Western Publishing finished, Western formed Gold Key Comics and somehow managed to take a load of DELL’s licensed characters and comics with them. Once such was, kind of, their Flying Saucers comic, which was transformed into UFO Flying Saucers. The first four issues of the DELL version are all original tales and the fifth issue, which was published much later during the same time as the Gold Key run, which is surprising in itself, is composed entirely of reprints of one of the earlier issues. I’ll confine my thoughts about the DELL title to the Gold Key version because it’s all pretty much two similar sides of the same coin.

The things that weren’t quite the same for the majority of the Gold Key title was that a) the stories were all much shorter, usually ranging between one and three pages each (so there were obviously a lot more stories per issue) and b) they were mostly presented as real life case reports and I do believe that they were trying to present what they saw in a serious and respectful way, at least when the comic first started, as illustrated versions of actual incidents. And it’s kind of scary in some ways because each is presented with it’s own specific time stamp and you’ll get modern incidents within the same issues as things like the prophet Ezekiel witnessing early alien spacecraft in the 6th century and, I don’t know, something about the mechanism departing the Earth with a sound of powerful running water (like a waterfall) seems to me to come off as something really eerily similar to what one of our modern rockets sound like if described back then. Kind of hard to imagine something terrestrial like this in the 6th Century, I reckon.

At first, stuff like this was keeping me fairly interested and there was some scary or, more often, just intriguing stuff culled from real life case files (some of which I recognised from my own research into the phenomenon more than a couple of decades ago... until I decided to give it up as sleepless nights no longer appealed to me). However, it has to be said, after a while this was getting boring precisely because of those limitations. An average story has various witnesses seeing either a UFO or an alien creature, nothing much really happening and then having said craft or creature departing and nobody believing the various witnesses except, sometimes, those ‘in the know’ who work for the government. There’s no real excitement in these things other than something sighted, something draining power or, occasionally, some human interaction which might or might not result in the death of said human or an animal. And that’s basically it.

Also, it looks like the idea was getting increasingly difficult for Gold Key to sustain by the time they got less than half way into their run. The stories already seemed exactly the same due to, you know, being based on what little they could grab of real life incidents... so they decided to go the whole hog and start asking readers for their true encounters with UFOs or aliens, the best ones sent in getting an adaptation in the comic. So, yeah, I can’t imagine how many people they got writing in and spinning them a yarn just to see their name in print. However, after a few issues of advertising this feature, they started doing exactly that. The readers’ stories are all pretty much just one page long but they are in abundance and, just like the slightly longer stories, they are all pretty much saying the same thing.

I’m guessing, in an effort to at least make some attempt to have some stories lasting longer than about three pages (you know... like five), some of the reported case studies are, I suspect, montaged together by what the writer at the time thought was a common denominator in certain tales... at least I’m pretty sure that’s what happened because, sometimes, some of the dates quoted in the stories seem completely contradictory. For example, in a story linking the deaths of various astronauts, at least one of the recorded deaths is from a fair few years ahead of the time zone of the guy telling his colleagues about them so... yeah, they seem to screw up sometimes.

And I don’t know what was happening in an issue from 1975 when the narrative talks about the ‘late’ famous astrophysicist and extraterrestrial researcher Carl Sagan... since he didn’t die actually for over 20 years later. No idea.

Another thing the writers did to hold interest was to introduce a ‘back up’ feature, which is a strange concept in a comic which would hold maybe ten ‘stories’ anyway, much as the successful Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom (which I reviewed here) had a Professor Harbinger strip. The back up in UFO Flying Saucers was called The Hoaxmaster and this top hatted fellow would talk directly to the audience and tell them the stupid tricks people have resorted to in order to get people to believe in UFOs. I guess it was the production team’s way of holding up the hoaxes to lend veracity to the other stories found in each issue. However, stuff like this was not enough and the magazine stopped publication for a while with issue 13 in January 1977.

However, the magazine returned with a slight name change in June 1978, continuing from issue 14 as UFO & Outer Space... the first two issues of which seem to consist entirely of reprints of stories from earlier issues. So what happened here to give Gold Key the idea to rush the magazine back onto the market after an almost a year and a half hiatus? Well, I can only speculate but I don’t think I’d be far wrong in suggesting that Steven Spielberg happened. December 1977 saw the release in America of his UFO movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and it was really popular (and sort of terrifying in some ways). It wasn’t as popular as Star Wars had been earlier in the year, of course but, it was taking the world by storm (we got it in the UK in 1978 and if I ever get around to reviewing it for this blog, I’ll tell of my terrifying experience after seeing that movie).

So my guess is that Gold Key saw the opportunity in the market and put the comic back out, filling it with selected reprints while the writers and artists, whoever these unsung folk were, beavered away on creating new material to capture the lightning in a bottle that was Spielberg’s film before the next trend came along. So before long we had... all the usual stuff again but also two new features. One was a two page text story each issue... the first two or three of which seem to be concentrating on paranormal investigation rather than anything else, so I suspect the first couple were filler reprinted from one of Gold Key’s horror titles. The other thing was a ‘What If...?’ story each month. The plus points on those stories were the fact that the stories could be both a little longer and, since they were being presented as a fiction, go a little further in terms of the various alien encounters in each tale. The minus points were... most of them were still pretty dull and dismal, perhaps to add to the authenticity. Oh... and there was also an attempt to have a running serial about a funny alien for light relief but... I suspect that wasn’t very well received because it vanished mid story after two or three issues (it just wasn’t funny).

By the end of the comic’s run in February 1980, reprints were once more beginning to creep in and the stories, as intriguing and worthy of exploration in real life, still seemed really dull in comic strip form... or at least they did to me. The very last issue looks like it was printed to fulfil some kind of contractual obligation and, once again, consists entirely of reprints. I suspect the comic wasn’t that much missed by anyone when it finally stopped publication.

That being said, although it felt like I was reading more or less the same stories over and over again in each issue, the comic book is something of a curio and it does hold a certain appeal... especially if you have an interest in the subject matter in the first place. It’s not really a comic I could recommend to anyone but some people would probably get a kick out of it and, as per usual with the Gold Key and DELL comics, the painted artwork covers for these things are absolutely superb. It’s just a shame the stories within those covers never really lived up to the spectacle on the front.

The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor

Feel Spektor

The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor
(The Gold Key Years)
Gold Key Issues 1 - 24 USA 1973 - 1977
plus assorted issues of
Gold Key’s Mystery Comics Digest

Written by Donald F. Glut and drawn by artists such as Dan Spiegle and Jesse Santos, The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor was a comic which, it seems to me, could never quite make its mind up what it wanted to be in terms of which of the obvious competitors - Marvel and DC - it was trying to emulate. Not to mention a healthy dose of EC comics in there too, in many respects. Doctor Spektor first appeared in the odd issue of the giant sized Gold Key publication Mystery Digest Comics and, in the early days, he was just one of the many ‘narrators’ such as in the the other Gold Key titles presented in the odd issue of this compilation comic. So you had a fair few Boris Karloff Presents... and Twilight Zone stories (presented by Rod Serling) in the pages here and, like the famous horror hosts such as EC's The Crypt Keeper, Spektor’s narration was just a way in to a very short, twisty horror yarn of 5 or 6 pages.

Even some of these early stories are ingenuous though and I especially liked one where a man who is in love with his separated siamese twin brother’s fiance kills himself but, through this sin, returns as a vampire (which is a new one on me). However, he tries to take his brother’s bride for himself and turn her into a vampire. To stop this from happening and knowing that he and his vampire brother still share a bond, the other brother throws himself out the window and kills himself by impaling himself on the railings below before his evil brother can take a bite out of his fiance. This, of course, causes the vampire to feel as if a stake has been driven through his heart and he also dies. And there’s a few of these little stories and this format carries on, for a while, in the pages of The Occult Files of Doctor Spektor, with a definite difference...

The majority of the early issues contain two stories. One stars supernatural investigator Doctor Adam Spektor himself and the other is an unrelated horror tale just hosted by him. Every now and again you will get the occasional issue which is just one long Doctor Spektor story and... after a while, the comic switched fully to this format of just having the one story starring Doctor Spektor plus one or two of a building, regular cast within these tales. And what a cast they are...

The first issue of the regular comic introduces us to Doctor Spektor’s new secretary Lakota Rainflower, who is a mix of Sioux and Apache Indian and who, very quickly, also become’s Spektor’s regular girlfriend. After a while we also meet characters like medium Elliot Kane and his girlfriend, not to mention Adam’s cousin Anne Sara. There’s also a regular cast of villains including the Frankenstein monster, the mummy Ra-Ka-Tep and Dracula.

There's also some interesting plotting decisions, changes and progressions to the various support cast too. I was pretty impressed with the first issue because it involves a vampire, Baron Tibor, who has returned from the dead, only for Spektor to discover that he has long atoned for his sins and just wants a peaceful life. Spektor invents a serum which takes away the majority of Tibor’s powers and allows him to lead a relatively normal life. The Baron continues to make the odd guest appearances as an ally of Doctor Spektor until, in one of the later issues, he wants to steal Adam’s secretary/girlfriend and turns into an evil vampire again... forcing Doctor Spektor to deal with him.

There’s also a lot of name dropping of famous literary or real life characters in the comic, like in the issue which sees Varney The Vampire, Countess Karnstein and Lord Ruthven teaming up with Dracula to try to take out Spektor. It even mentions the famous Borgo Pass for all the Dracula afficionados out there. One of Van Helsing’s heirs is also present as a modern day supernatural bounty hunter but he becomes as much of a villain as the others in the tale and he returns in a later issue to give Spektor more trouble.

One of the great things about the majority of these stories is that, although they are all stand alone tales, they tend to refer back and link up quite thoroughly with previous issues and so an almost constant story arc seems to be in play. It’s a story arc which sees quite a lot of changes in Spektor’s character and, as he gets more involved in the plot of the ancient evil that attacks him from beyond our realm, there’s a real sense in later stories that Glut or the publishers wanted to give him a kind of Doctor Strange vibe, by allowing him to battle with various demons using the odd archaeological relic.

And this all seems to shift a lot in intent throughout the course of the stories.

For instance, there’s a three or four issue set of tales where Doctor Spektor is suffering from the ill effects of a lycanthropic bite and he seems to be suddenly transformed into something from out of the pages of one of his nearest, popular Marvel comics rivals for a bit... Werewolf By Night. There’s even a Swamp Thing/Man-Thing (take your pick from DC or Marvel) kind of character introduced to the pages towards the end of the run.

However, all these ups and downs in terms of the status of the lead character do keep things interesting, although there are also a few things which are a bit more irritating. Such as...

Doctor Spektor seems to have an almost supernatural talent for being knocked unconscious by the villain of the month in order to allow either his own capture or for the abduction of Lakota Rainflower. I mean, this guy must have brain damage or something by now because I’m talking about him getting knocked unconscious nearly every issue.

Also... and this is really annoying... since Doctor Spektor is narrating his own tale, he also seems to have knowledge to relate to his personal adventures which he can never actually know about at times. For example, stuff will happen when Spektor is not present and all parties involved may die or disappear into the ether but, somehow, Spektor knows all about it to be able to relate it to the reader, first person. It’s a bit much and a bit of a schoolboy error.

Another obviously bad lack of attention to detail comes in the form of the artwork. In the issues where Doctor Spektor transforms into a werewolf, he more than likely rips his clothing and his top may be beyond repair very quickly. So the question I was dying to find out was... why is it that when he comes back to his normal, human form, he comes back fully clothed again? I mean... seriously.

Plus, I think I would have liked a little more of a back story to the Bruce Wayne-like, wealthily independent Adam Spektor, owner of Spektor Manor. Where does he get all his money from... not to mention his lust for seeking out the supernatural? Questions like these are never answered.

However, there are more than enough good things on hand to make this comic a nice read and there are even some unexpected crossovers which turn up in the stories unannounced. For example, The Owl, who first appeared in a 1940s issue of Crackerjack Funnies, makes an appearance in one issue as he tries to clear his name when a real life demon owl-man is causing havoc. Similarly, Doctor Solar makes an appearance which is presumably set between the initial Gold Key run of Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom (which I reviewed here) and the later, short lived Whitman branded series of four issues. The look of Solar when he’s not in uniform in this, though, not to mention some slight tweaks to his demeanour, make him seem like more of an old hippy than the character as written in those original Gold Key comics, it seemed to me.

All in all, though, the artwork is good although somewhat sporadic when it comes to the look of the characters. In some of them Spektor seems a little haggard and just what you’d expect from a male horror host whereas, for the majority of the issues, he’s more the kind of Errol Flynn style heartthrob who you could actually believe a few of the female characters lurking within the pages are so mesmerised by, which is the case of some of the lead villainesses. Ditto for some of the supporting characters like Elliot Kane... who is sometimes a fairly thin individual and at other times, somewhat pudgy I would say. The layouts are a far cry from the days of Doctor Solar though, it has to be said, with some much more dynamic designs  making up the majority of the stories.

A couple of issues towards the end, Spektor’s girlfriend Lakota leaves him for reasons which aren’t quite made clear. As he tries to dull the pain of her departing over subsequent issues, one gets the feeling that, despite a few encounters with other women to tide him over, this is supposed to be a set up for a dramatic return of the character. Instead, the comic was cancelled, presumably before any such arc had time to play out. There was, after the final issue of the series, one last appearance of the character in a comic called Gold Key Spotlight, Issue 8. Alas, I haven’t been able to, as yet, track that one down but my understanding is that Lakota is a ‘no show’ in this tale too.

This wasn’t quite the last of Spektor, however. My understanding is that there was/is a more modern reboot of the character... although I think it was quite short lived. I’ll try and track that one down again for this blog at some point but for now, that’s me done with The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor, I think. I have to say though that, like Doctor Solar, I thoroughly enjoyed these comics, despite (and in some ways because) of their faults and would recommend these to anyone with an eye for four colour horror. Give these ones a go... they are quite entertaining and Donald F. Glut, who I mostly remember for writing the novelisation of The Empire Strikes Back, has an eye for the dramatic, for sure.

Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom

Up And Atom

Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom
(The Gold Key and Whitman Years)
Gold Key Issues 1 - 27 USA 1962 - 1969
Whitman Issues 28 - 31 1981 - 1982

Written and drawn, initially and without credit, by Paul S Newman and Bob Fujitani, Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom was not a comic I read when I was a kid. I always loved the beautiful covers of those old, Gold Key comics, which were the biggest rival to Marvel and DC then back in the 1960s and 1970s but there were not that many of them around over here in comparison to the sheer volume of their competitor’s comics and they never had the issue number printed on the front other than a kind of code number that the publishers used. I had a couple of their Star Trek issues (and a load of the strips reprinted in the British annuals), a big black and white reprint album/colouring book of some of their Boris Karloff Presents... series and, I think a Scooby Doo comic I have might be from Gold Key too (or else that one was published by Dell, like the Alvin comic I had). But those covers were always much more stunning than the Marvel and DC covers of the time and featured some nice painted artwork.

Doctor Solar was published for eight years in the 1960s, which is a fair run until you realise that Gold Key comics were never published that often and the frequency at which they were published varied form year to year. Doctor Solar was published anything from between twice a year up to maybe four or five times a year. He’s a nice character though and, having now read this Gold Key run, I found it very interesting that the style of the character changed/progressed over the stories as, one can conclude, the Marvel superhero comics which became incredibly popular from 1962 onwards, had an influential impact on the contemporary comics scene.

Doctor Raymond Solar was the real name of a scientist who worked in ‘Atom Valley’ with his colleagues Doctor Gail Sanders and Doctor Clarkson. However, while trying to stop an atomic accident which kills one of his other colleagues, Solar doesn’t die as you might expect but, like many comic book characters of the time, finds himself transformed into an ‘super powered man’ who can change his body into various forms of atomic energy to stop the forces of evil from trying to obtain the secrets of Atom Valley. Dr. Clarkson is in on his ‘secret identity’ from day one (as the president of the USA soon is, too) since Solar has to live, confined in his lab/office so others won’t have much exposure to his level of radioactivity for long stints and, also, so he can be recharged. Gail, the ‘almost love interest’ of the comic, also is let in on the secret after a few issues. Already, though, you can see the influence of Marvel since the character sometimes turns green when using his atomic powers (actually, the green colouring is a bit random in the first few issues but gets a half baked explanation for this phenomena as the series progresses).

The stories are fine and all based on scientific principles which often generated a lot of letters for the letters page where various kids would write in about continuity glitches or factual errors which the publishers would then have to try and write off with elabourate scientific explanations. He also had his own Blowfeld-like super-villain, who you would only see from behind or with his features partially hidden behind a speech balloon with just his prominent bald head to indicate he was responsible for the latest evil plot (he also appears in almost all the issues and the letters pages are full of people complaining that it’s almost always the same villain).

The early issues would contain two Doctor Solar stories per issue with a short back up strip, Professor Harbinger, sandwiched between the two. As the series progressed, the two Solar stories would be two parts of the same story but, for the 27 Gold Key issues, the Professor Harbinger stories were always in there because he was popular with the readers and I can certainly see why. These are great little stories where Gold Key’s very own Harbinger of doom would highlight a scientific achievement or miracle of nature and then start imagining/speculating/explaining to the reader what could happen if things naturally progressed on this theme in the future and how humanity might perish from the result of the seed sown from this scientific nugget. The strip would then end with an indication that Harbinger’s prophecies were already under way, which would make the Professor jump or nearly pass out until it turns out that, say, a giant bug was really just a projected shadow or a creature flying outside the window was really just a shaped helium balloon. I must say, I really enjoyed these little flights of fancy as much as I enjoyed the main Solar strip so I can see why they didn’t stop running them.

Now Doctor Solar was pretty unique for the first four issues... he didn’t even have a costume and I must say I did like that fact. However, those pesky Marvel and, to an extent, DC heroes were leading the way in sales and so various concessions can be seen coming in as the stories progressed. In Issue 5, Solar finally gets a costume to help protect his secret identity. It uses the radiation symbol on a red costume and is very similar to the costume used by the creators of The Simpsons (who were obviously paying tribute here) for their Radioactive Man character. However, he also has a visor (and glasses when he’s just plain old Ray Solar) to protect others from his unhealthy, radioactive glare and I can’t help but think this might have been ‘acquired’ from Cyclops of Marvel’s The Uncanny X-Men, who made a debut earlier in the same year. Similarly, stories where Ray demonstrates that he can cool down his body to freezing temperatures, heat it up etc might well be borrowed from X-Men’s Iceman and the newer version of The Human Torch, who would have gained popularity in Fantastic Four comics at the time. It’s all a bit tell tale when, for the first time ever in Issue 7, Doctor Solar is referred to in the narrative as a radioactive ‘mutant’... a word which was fully popularised right from the outset in the X-Men comics, if I recall correctly. Although, to be fair, the term doesn’t have the same satirical message that it did in the Marvel comic.

Again, as Ray demonstrates in later stories that he can shrink his body to tiny size or, indeed (and accidentally at first) grow to a huge, giant-sized version of himself, you have to wonder if the Ant-Man (and later Giant-Man incarnation of that character) was a huge hit with the kids at the time. And it could have been any number of Marvel villains who served as a template when, in the later comics, Nuro transplanted his brain into his robot helper Orun and became a more active, mechanical threat to his super powered nemesis.

When the strip first started, as with the Doc Savage Gold Key comic I reviewed here, the page layouts were all five panels per page operating out of a six panel grid, two by three, with one or other of the panels being stretched vertically or horizontally to break up the page. However, as Marvel and DC presumably grew more adventurous and the artists influenced other people in the same field, the layouts grow more relaxed and dynamic as the comic progresses.

And then, in 1969 and without warning, the comic just stops. Doctor Solar does have at least one later crossover appearance in an issue of Gold Key’s The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor but I haven’t read that one yet... and I’ll save it for when I read those for another review for this blog (hopefully fairly soon). After this, the character was put on ice until the same publishers, under the name of Whitman Publishing, brought the character back for four issues running sporadically from 1981 to 1982. The art is not much different but the story content seems a lot less interesting and, by this time, the character of Doctor Solar is a lot more haunted by his fate. Also, in an age after Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, Buck Rogers In The 25th Century and a whole host of other, popular science fiction films and shows, he also seems to have two ‘cute and funny’ robot helpers lending a hand in Atom Valley... which really sets it apart from the earlier stories where the writers did, at least, try to keep the majority of the tales less fantastical where they could (with only the odd alien or energy monster unleashed in the strip very rarely). These issues dropped Professor Harbinger and, instead, had another popular Gold Key character making a return in the pages, Magnus Robot Fighter (again, another run I have to read for this blog). Probably the worst thing about Whitman’s brief resurrection of the character, however, was the awful, drawn covers. These things look quite childish and are a far cry from the traditional Gold Key covers of the 1960s and 1970s.

Again, there’s no warning of cancellation on this brief reappearance of the character but this wasn’t Solar’s last hurrah, by a long shot. In the 1990s and still, I think, to this day, there are new versions of the character, although none of them are actually Phil Solar. I believe the first ‘rebirth’ of the character actually took his inspiration from being a fan of the old Gold Key comics and so, when he is transformed into a similar being, pays homage to them. I’ll probably get around to catching up with these at some point in the next ten years though, I suspect. Meanwhile, I would thoroughly recommend the original Gold Key run of Doctor Solar - Man Of The Atom as they are quite nice commentaries of a certain section of society who were reading them (I found a young Paul Gambaccini had written in on one of the 1960s letter pages) and, despite their growing similarities to the comics of ‘the opposition’ on the racks at the time, they were also their own unique thing, to an extent. Quite a change of pace from the amount of teenage angst which made the Marvel tales so popular during the same period (and which became more prominent in the Doctor Solar comics in their short Whitman incarnation).

Doc Savage (Gold Key)

Bronzed Gold

Doc Savage
Gold Key USA 1966

Back in 1966, movie history was almost about to be made…

If things had gone to plan, a certain pulp character favourite of mine may well have been a lot better known internationally than he is these days. The film was Doc Savage and it was to star TV western actor Chuck Connors in the title role and to be based on Lester Dent’s Doc Savage novel, The Thousand Headed Man. Alas, an error about certain kinds of rights residing with Dent’s widow and not solely by the company who thought they owned them meant that the producers couldn’t start shooting the film, which was already scripted, on the date they wanted. So, at the eleventh hour, they retained the cast and crew and instead rushed out a western, Ride Beyond Vengeance, instead. Looking over the cast that they ported over into this other production, you can kinda see who some of the actors might have been intended to play in the Doc Savage movie and, I have to say, there are some good facial ‘types’ that showed that the people doing the casting were actually taking their job very seriously.

Chuck Connors, for example, was a good match in looks for the James Bama version of Doc Savage. Bama was the artist who had recently been doing all those wonderful cover paintings for the 1960s Bantam reprints of the novels which were very popular at the time. Although the style of Savage’s look via Bama was very different to that of the paintings which had appeared on the original pulp printings of the novels in the Doc Savage magazine of the 1930s and 40s, they’ve pretty much defined the look of the character ever since and are still imitated in books and comics to this day. Bama’s original model for his covers was Steve Holland, who played Flash Gordon on a dreadful German/American coproduction on TV in the 1950s show of Alex Raymond's much loved character so, if you want to see what the ‘real’ Doc Savage from this period was supposed to look like, take a look at an episode of that. Connors, though, had the same kind of weathered look to him and would have been a good version, physically at least. One can also deduce from the cast that made it into the western that Claude Akins would have been, again at least in terms of facial recognition, a perfect match for Monk Mayfair (one of Doc’s five aides) and, likewise, Michael Rennie would have been a solid choice for Ham Brooks, the lawyer (someone who the film company could have used in real life if they’d wanted a quick legal fix to their problem).

Alas the movie was never made and we shall never know if it would have been a better, more well loved fit to the original material than the George Pal produced Doc Savage movie of 1975 (which I reviewed here) and how much recognition it might have brought the character. What we do have left for us though, is the Gold Key comic from the same year which was almost certainly adapted from the script of that movie (different kinds of rights issues for comics than for movies) and which may or may not have strayed from the script. Certainly it would have been a fairly condensed version of the script to fit into one tiny comic and it really isn’t a thoroughly good job of adapting the novel, for sure. But what is it like as a comic?

Well, I finally bit the bullet on this thing a few years ago on eBay when I found an issue in not bad condition for a, relatively, reasonable price. I’d always wanted to read it and, well, now I have.

The cover is magnificent, being a blown up detail of Bama’s Doc fighting a large snake lifted from the cover of the Bantam reprint of Doc Savage - The Thousand Headed Man… which is, please note, a completely different cover than was used on the UK Corgi edition of the story, where a doctored reprint of a James Bama cover painting from an entirely different Doc Savage novel in the series was used, for reasons completely unknown to me. However, whoever was responsible for the writing of the adaptation and the interior art is completely unknown. It looks to me like Gold Key, even at that time, were not crediting the writers and artists like DC and Marvel were.

What I can tell you about the interior art, however, is that it doesn't really look like the actors from the ‘movie that never was’ and more like the renditions that Bama used to characterise Doc and his crew on the back covers of those Bantam reprints. This makes sense. Many comics are made from film adaptations and usually all the writers and artists have to go on is the working script and a few stills of the characters. Think back to the original Marvel comics adaptation of the first Star Wars film for example… there were loads of scenes in that which didn’t make it into the movie and, decades later in the era of ‘extras’ like deleted scenes, it became apparent that the majority of those sequences were shot but had not made it into the final cut of the film. These things happen but at least the likenesses of the characters, in some cases, looked as they appear in the film (Don’t get me started on Jabba, okay?) so there’s that. Alas, when it came to the Doc Savage movie, the team at Gold Key obviously didn't have any stills to work with so I’m guessing that production went ahead after they knew the film project was cancelled and the rights holders, by now Conde Naste, wanted to recoup some money by letting the comic go ahead. That’s what I suspect, anyway.

And… it’s not a brilliant comic in terms of action, it has to be said. And the writing is not all that dramatic either.. For example, comic  book shorthand to introduce the characters is used and so Ham is much maligned by being referred to as ‘the toff’. Worse still, given that Clark Savage Jr, The Man Of Bronze himself is not exactly noted for an abundance of verbal commentary and, given this is a comic book and even more of a purely visual art form than a film would be, it’s amazing how verbose he is in this. Talking to himself often and using phrases completely out of character for him such as ‘I’ll bet my shirt…’. Sure, that kind of outburst might be fine coming from a few of Doc’s crew but not the man himself, I would say. I think they might have been better using descriptive boxes more on the case of the scenes where Savage is ‘flying solo’, so to speak, rather than put explanations in his mouth when he famously never explains his actions to those around him.

In addition to this, the drama is fairly flat and, though I last read the original novel back in 1975, I remember the mystery of the thing and the unusual keys that drive the story being fairly suspenseful… in other words, fairly standard brilliance that you would expect from Lester Dent writing under the house name of Kenneth Robeson. Here it’s virtually non existent and, while I concur that the whole story in just 32 four colour pages is a pretty tall order, everything here just seems a bit rushed and really doesn’t allow for any of the characters to shine through, least of all Doc, who almost seems like a guest star in his own comic at times.

The art is, fairly nice but there’s nothing too experimental or wildly interesting here. I’d say it’s pretty competent but there purely to illustrate the text, rather then enhance it. The same can be said of the design of the panels too. There’s a pretty rigid layout of mostly five panels per page (asides from the ones I’ve pictured above, obviously). The majority of pages consist of a basic, vertical two by three panel page but with one panel of each page extended either vertically or horizontally to try and break it up just a little. Looking at some other Gold Key comics from the time and others from about eight years later, this is fairly common for the company at the time and they would later on get a little more dynamic with their layouts by the time they were putting out titles like The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor.

And… that’s about all I have to say about the Gold Key, Doc Savage one-shot based on Doc Savage - The Thousand Headed Man other than to say that, if the film had happened with that script, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have set cinema screens ablaze but, frankly, we’ll never know how closely it would have followed that script and just how much better it may have been on screen. Still, despite the comic not being all that special, I am really pleased to finally own a copy and, it has to be said, I did learn that Croydon used to have an airport, so there’s that (although, by the time this comic was published, there hadn’t been one there for a while but, still, it’s a 1930s period piece so that’s not really an issue). This one is probably not going to appeal to casual readers, for sure but, for long standing Doc Savage readers like myself, this is pure gold and, dull as this adaptation is, it’s a little piece of both comic book and movie history regarding this character and it’s an essential piece of ephemera, as far as I’m concerned. One for the ages.

Star Trek - Series One

Where No Man 
Has Gorn Before

Star Trek Series One
1966 USA
Produced by Gene Roddenberry
Paramount BluRay Region A/B

Space.

The Final Frontier.

It was back in 1973, I think, when I first started watching the voyages of the Starship Enterprise on BBC1 via my parents old TV set. I was five years old. The year is pretty easy to place for me, actually, because I must have liked the show so much that, at the end of that year, my folks got me the Star Trek Annual 1973, one of many hardcover annual editions put out in the UK with full colour reprints culled from the US Star Trek comic put out by Gold Key. I remember, I used to read that and subsequent annuals a lot until well into my teens.

I loved the show but I was never, at the time, able to appreciate it in colour and it was not until the mid 1980s that I was finally able to see the full spectrum of the show in some much later re-runs. By then, I was a fully fledged Star Trek fan. Merchandise and toy manufacture was not quite as gung ho in those days when it came to tie-ins with film and TV as it became post Star Wars (around about 1978) but there were a few Star Trek items I had in the early to mid 1970s, in addition to the annuals, that I was proud to be the owner of.

My first item was the old Mego action figure of Captain Kirk which I took home with me after my parents spotted it at an early 1970s Ideal Home Exhibition. Mr. Spock was added to my horde within a year. I also grabbed a very handy, paperback reference book from either Dark They Were And Golden Eyed or Forbidden Planet (my two favourite shops at the time) called The Star Trek Catalogue, which probably would seem quite primitive in style to fans today but, back in the 70s, it was the essential guide to the show and included a handy episode guide to the series. I also had another episode guide to the show in a book called Fantastic Television, another essential 1970s book purchase for the discerning sci-fi fan. As were The Star Trek Blueprints and the Dinky die-cast Starship Enterprise (mine broke in a way far more devastating than any found in the original series... but I'm not going to disclose on how that happened).

Then came the 12 famous Star Trek fotonovels which were released by Bantam (and a couple by Corgi too), which were a great way to catch up with the show in an age when re-runs were still fairly scarce and the concept of easy to purchase and watch video tapes were something the majority of the nation couldn’t even begin to comprehend back then. They just hadn’t quite been invented yet. I guess people from later generations must find it difficult to imagine that the planet was stuck in a time when you couldn’t just decide to sit down and watch something you wanted to watch. If there was a film you wanted to revisit, you’d scour the TV listings for years, since there was usually a good two to four year gap between the same film being shown again. It really was a different world we were living in back then and home entertainment systems were pretty much a needle dropped onto a vinyl surface or a bunch of printed pages bound together. That was it, unless you got something like the Scalextric or a train set out. Or played with your Action Man.

I’ve been meaning to revisit this show for some time now but I had been steadily avoiding the recent DVD issues because of either re-tracked in music in the odd episode where license fees were not paid or, in the current re-issues, a lack of being able to see the episodes in their original state at all. A few years ago, Paramount got all “George Lucas” on the show and reshot all the special effects sequences of these things and inserted them into the episodes, along with creating a new title sequence and, even worse, rerecording the opening theme on those titles. However, when I read that on the new Blu-Ray issues, unlike the DVDs, you had the choice to watch them with their original and, sometimes dodgy looking, effects sequences etc. back in place, I knew that these would be the versions to watch.

So here I am.

And I have to say, it was absolutely great watching this first season again.

When you think of classic and groundbreaking television of the era, shows which really dared to go where no man had gone before, Star Trek was very much ahead of its time. While I was watching these it very much put me in mind of an earlier show from the late 1950s and early 1960s which explored similar territory... that is, the territory of ideas... The Twilight Zone (which I am also currently rewatching on Blu Ray, my first series review is here). Science fiction has always been a style of prose where, because of the fantastic realms you can get away with in that genre, you could explore the ideas related to the human condition in such a way that you could push further and take it to extremes you couldn’t get away with in other formats like, say, a hospital soap opera. You can’t examine the idea of the good part of the psyche and the bad part of your psyche and how they would react independent of each other in regular fiction, for example. However, if you have the concept of a transporter beam malfunction which then splits a person into the two separate beings, as it does with Kirk in the season one episode The Enemy Within, you can explore not just the possibility that your id is stronger and more confident than the other part, but also the fact that on their own, those two parts couldn’t exist without certain aspects of the other. Even Robert Louis Stevenson had to use a science fiction base for his own celebrated study of a not dissimilar concept.

This is where shows like The Twilight Zone and Star Trek really win out, of course, and it’s a stroke of genius that Roddenberry conceived of a format for his show, basically a clipper exploring the stars, that would allow you to be able to bring a whole load of different ideas to the table, just like you could in The Twilight Zone, but with a single, regular cast and a setting that gave enough of an anchor for viewers to see a familiar face each week but be flexible enough to allow for the diverse nature of the stories on offer. And, just like The Twilight Zone, many of those stories were written by gifted science fiction writers who would be very well remembered in years to come.

It was also quite gutsy. When I was watching it again, I was struck how different this series would be if it was made now. There are rarely any punches pulled in the way these stories are told, ideas conveyed. Even when the sequel series, Star Trek The Next Generation, was airing decades later, it was a softer, somewhat watered down and more politically correct version, in some ways, than the good ol’ knock ‘em down, “to the death” days of Kirk and his crew back in the sixties. Blood is spilled, people’s minds are played with and moral stances challenged in the least wishy washy ways you could imagine.

There are many key episodes in this first season which deal with interesting themes. Mudd’s Women, for example, deals with drug addiction fuelled by women who are concerned with their fading beauty as age hits them. Not an idea that would be tackled too easily in our sensitive times today, perhaps, but it even manages to do it with a sense of humour which doesn’t once undercut the pathos of the three ladies in question. Or The Galileo Seven, which is all about the prejudice against Spock and the will to survive and protect the people around you in extreme circumstances when they are almost against you as much as your collective odds of survival. Racial intolerance is also highlighted in this season quite overtly.

Another good one is Miri, which treats adolescence in a similar fashion to William F. Nolan’s novel Logan’s Run, and which guest stars Kim Darby and Michael J. Pollard. And there’s the original story of Khan, as played by Ricardo Montalban in the episode Space Seed, a role he would reprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and which Benedict Cumberbatch would help reboot in the recent feature film Star Trek: Into Darkness. Then there’s Arena, where instead of waging a long and bloody war, Kirk has to fight the alien Gorn on a planet, re-invents gunpowder projectiles and shows mercy, thus saving the day.

And, of course, no one can forget the brilliant, award winning time travel story City On The Edge Of Forever by Harlan Ellison, where Leonard Nimoy’s Spock has to convince William Shatner’s Kirk that his new sweetheart from the 1930s, played by young Joan Collins, has to die in order for history to be restored.

This season also includes my two absolute favourite Star Trek episodes ever...

Shore Leave, in which the crew are endangered (and some of them seemingly killed) by events and situations pulled directly from their imagination. The look on De Forrest Kelley’s face as his character, Dr. McCoy, is confronted with the man-size white rabbit from Alice In Wonderland, asking him the time, is absolutely priceless and the whole episode in general shows off the comic capabilities of the ensemble of actors very well. Devil In The Dark, a chase and shoot creature feature, is another one which becomes high concept when it transforms into being about something completely different by the end of the episode... a mother guarding her eggs. The concept was so good, in fact, that the story was pretty much rewritten and reused for the final episode of the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show in the early 1970s.

This show has brilliant colour and camerawork throughout, throwing bright greens against a wall, for example, even when there is no way that kind of lighting could be naturally occurring in that particular environment. In this way, actually, the show is very Bavaesque in its mise-en-scene.

Another big plus is the level of detail. For a mid-1960s TV show, everything is well thought out and concepts like beacons, sub-space recorders, disc storage and a whole host of things which wouldn’t necessarily be thought of today, are included in the chemical make up of the show. Admittedly, things like uniform colours to show rank or department are a little inconsistent at first, but it all gets worked out by the end of season one. Lieutenant Uhura, for example, looks even more gorgeous wearing the gold variation of her uniform, but eventually the red variant became her regular garb.

The music in the show is phenomenal. There’s lots of original stuff, as the limited edition 15 disc CD boxed set from La La Land showed a couple of years ago, and this is often used in a needle drop capacity throughout many episodes and gives a lot of familiar tunes and textures you can identify with on an episode to episode basis. This is all good stuff (and that CD set is well recommended, by the way).

All in all, Star Trek - Series One is a great start to a show which was cancelled way too early but which came back with a vengeance in the wake of the first feature film. It’s a show which is all about ideas and not necessarily action... although with Kirk and crew in the mix, you can be sure there’s plenty of fist fights and explosions thrown in for good measure. After seeing this series again, I can’t recommend it enough. It has everything a science fiction fan could want... and I can’t wait to start on the next box with series two in it.

Star Trek @ NUTS4R2
Star Trek Series 1
Star Trek - The Motion Picture 
Star Trek II - The Wrath Of Khan
Star Trek III - The Search For Spock
Star Trek IV - The Voyage Home 
Star Trek V - The Final Frontier 
Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country
Star Trek - Generations (aka Star Trek VII) 
Star Trek - First Contact 
Star Trek - Insurrection 
Star Trek Nemesis 

Star Trek 11

Star Trek: In Darkness (aka Star Trek 12)

Star Trek Beyond