Alvin And His Pals In Merry Christmas Dell Giant

We Wish You A
Merry Chipmunk

Alvin And His Pals In
Merry Christmas with
Clyde Crashcup and
Leonardo Dell Giant
Issue Code 02-120-402
Dell Four Colour Comics
1963

Okay, I used to love the one issue I had of Dell Comics’ Alvin when I was a kid. Mainly because, since I was born in 1968, I’ve been listening to the original Christmas With The Chipmunks album throughout every December, initially on the original vinyl album from '68 onwards but, from around somewhere in the early 2000s, on a CD version with the same cover reproduced on the front. So, yeah, to date I’ve listened to this album multiple times over 54 years... I guess I must have listened to it well over 200 times (probably more like 300) which isn’t too bad, given that it only comes out to play in December.

This Alvin And His Pals In Merry Christmas Dell Giant from 1963 (which seems to have been reissued, from what I can tell, annually for a few years after its initial release, at the princely sum of 25 cents) is fresh to me and, it’s somewhat disappointing... but also, somehow kinda horrific, inappropriate and also expressive of the duality of man, I thought.

So the big downside is the Clyde Crashcup story, which features as multi-episode, meandering story arc which is printed between various, stand alone Chipmunk stories... along with the usual activity pages and single page text stories. This involves an ‘inventor’ who can just draw things with his magic pen into the air and they just exist as his new inventions. Ignoring the questionable science involved in this, of course, it has to be said that everything he manages to invent in this story is something that has already been invented (such as when he decides to invent Santa Claus before his assistant Leonardo points out there’s already such a being in existence). It’s a convoluted road journey which ends up, after a few dull adventures, with the two titular protagonists hitching a ride back to their place on Santa’s sleigh. Which is also questionable within the confines of this issue if you assume the characters share the same universe as Alvin and the Chipmunks, in terms of Santa but... I’ll get to that in just a minute.

Okay, so the stand alone Chipmunk tales are okay. Starting off on a nice one where the chipmunks mistake various Christmas traditions for more sinister things, when they flashback to their first ever Christmas with David Seville. Various shenanigans in the tales are standard stuff but entertaining enough, especially if you are a kid (which, mentally, I still pretty much am... yay for me).

But there’s a dark heart beating at the centre of these tales in that, in the first story the tradition of the man of the house, dressing up as the make believe Santa (in this case Dave) is firmly established. Which in itself must have been a blow for any youngsters reading this particular story in 1963. However, above and beyond this trauma, there’s something else which makes no sense. In a story where the Chipmunks are dreaming about helping Father Christmas deliver toys on his sleigh, the twist to the story is that they didn’t dream it and they were actually helping out the real Santa Claus. Wait, what? How can this be when the previous story had lifted the lid and  continued the tradition of parents dressing up as the non-existent Santa? In fact, in another story, Dave is telling the boys about how delivering presents is Santa's job... huh? Is he gaslighting them now? No explanation of this dual manifestation is forthcoming in the strip and I’m sure this would have laid the seeds of schizophrenia in various children exposed to this questionable, continuity busting, retrofitting of values already established in the first story.

The activity pages and text stories are all fine and quite wholesome in some ways... although I suspect the page dedicated to showing kids how to Make Your Own Golliwog may not get much of an appreciative audience these days. One lovely page has the music and lyrics printed to The Chipmunk Song, which is one of the tracks on that initial album that got me into the furry trio in the first place... so that was nice.

And then there’s the last, somewhat worrying Chipmunk story in the issue. Dave, Alvin, Simon and Theodore are prepping for Christmas and they buy way too much food. But then they see their neighbours... a father, mother and two kids... out on the street singing Christmas carols for the neighbourhood, as they do every year apparently. However, they are a very poor family with ripped clothes and very little money to eat. So Alvin and the gang invite the neighbours in to share their huge Christmas dinner with them... which is a really nice sentiment and teaches kids about the gift of kindness, for sure. Except... hang on... there’s something fishy going on here. If these jolly carollers are so poor then why are they living in the same neighbourhood as the obviously well off David Seville and his chipmunks? If Dave is living in an upmarket suburb of the USA then surely these poor people would not be able to afford to live in a house in the same district. Similarly, if they are living in more ‘wealth appropriate’ accommodation, then why would Seville be living in a run down neighbourhood when he can obviously afford to look after three growing Chipmunks and overspend on huge amounts of Christmas food? This obviously doesn’t make sense but, again, at no moment in these pages is any attempt made to explain this conundrum.

And, yeah, okay... that’s me done on this rather short but, hopefully, revealing review of the 1963 Alvin And His Pals In Merry Christmas Dell Giant. An entertaining issue but, as you can see, with a darker seam lurking beneath the Christmas values the comic book appears to be peddling. Fun, entertaining and traumatic reading for the kiddies, for 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.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? The Comic

Look Before You Sheep

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?
The Comic - Boom Studios
24 issues 2009-2010
Art by Tony Parker, Adapted from Philip K. Dick

Wow. It’s not that often I get on board with comic book adaptations but this one is absolutely amazing in the ways it’s both faithful and unfaithful to the original source material. Hopefully when I elaborate on the various qualities of the comic, that comment will become clearer.

Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is probably my favourite novel. I read it maybe ten times over the decade after I first discovered it which was, I’m sure to nobody’s surprise, the week after the movie adaptation, Blade Runner (which is my favourite movie and which I reviewed here) was released in cinemas here in the UK, back in 1982. The first time I read it I had a hard time with it, in some ways (although I loved Dick’s way of expressing himself in words right off the bat). My biggest criticism of the film after first reading it was that it was nothing like the original novel. It wasn’t too long, however... and after a couple more read throughs... that I realised that, actually, the novel was only different in specific sequences of what is actually going on in a scene from moment to moment. There are literally, if you take adaptation as purely that, only two scenes from the novel translated in the movie.

However, by the time I’d finished my degree course in Graphic Design and wrote (and completed a year before deadline... I was that into it) my final major thesis on the specific ways in which the movie actually was, in spirit, a very faithful adaptation to many of the concepts inherent in the original novel, I was completely sold on both the film and the source and how well they complemented each other.

Of course, that still left me with the concept I found the hardest thing to fathom the very first time I read the book... Mercerism.

The empathic religious union which is one of the main concerns of the novel, where people grip the twin handles of their ‘empathy box’ and ‘merge with Mercer’... an old man who rises from the ‘tomb- world’ and tries to reach the top of a mountain while stones are lobbed at him... was nowhere to be found in the movie. Or was it? I think it could be argued that the Voight-Kampff test based on both empathy and the other driving force of the novel - the responsibility to look after the last surviving animals on the planet or, if you can’t afford one, then to pretend you have one by buying a cheap, electronic simulacrum of one so you don’t seem like an uncaring individual - is as much about the point of Mercerism as anything else.

I’m not going to get in to that argument here though because I’m not talking about the movie version... I’m talking about this comic book version which is, I have to say, pretty much on the nose in terms of capturing the spirit and style of the novel. Of course, half the battle is using a lot of the writer’s original words in both the speech bubbles and in the long stretches of narrative used in the comic but... this rendition really is the closest you can get to reading the original novel if, for some reason, you’ve never read it.

Now the look of some of the characters is interesting here. Many of the those in the movie are not quite the same as in the novel but what the artist, Tony Parker, has done here is to give some (by no means all) equivalent characters a very similar look to what they had in the film. So, for example, even though Deckard is married and a slightly different kind of person in the story, he’s made him look very much like the Harrison Ford version in terms of his dress and hair style etc. Similarly, although genetic designer J. F. Sebastian was originally J. R. Isidore, the low IQ ‘chickenhead’ character and humble employee of the maintenance team who service the electric animals under the disguise of a veterinarian hospital... he looks quite similar here to his movie counterpart. Other characters like Roy Batty look considerably less like those in the film but the artist has definitely gone out of his way to cross pollinate the two worlds - the world of the novel and the world of the film - as much as he possibly can, at least in terms of the visual look of the piece.

And the text is really faithful (just basically taking Dick’s words) with layouts that are simply brilliant. The way vast numbers of narrative panels will butt up against each other and also overlap with speech bubbles is ingenious and he uses the shapes created by these overlapping elements as a way of giving the reader a visual pathway to the order in which to read and decode the page, so to speak. Despite some quite cluttered and beautifully artwork which is quite complex in itself, you never really find yourself getting confused in the narrative space of the thing, even in the specific sections dealing with Mercerism.

In fact, the Mercerism stuff as the artist has chosen to render it here is, if anything, even clearer in terms of how the fusion works because you can see it happening as characters are superimposed or half drawn as Wilbur Mercer in those sequences. And this is what I mean when I say that even where the artist has been unfaithful to the concept, it still ends up retaining the spiritual levity of the original. For example, when I first read the novel back in 1982, the empathy box I visualised was some kind of large cabinet and, to be fair, there were only so many ways to imagine it in those days. In this comic book, Parker has used a TV screen to project the image of Mercer and... a stroke of genius this... where the characters go to ‘grip the twin handles’ of the empathy box, here he’s reimagined it as a kind of modern gaming controller like something you’d find connected to a Playstation console... with the twin handles being the two obvious bits you grip on those controllers. This isn’t something Dick in his time (nor I when I first read it) would have been able to predict or confidentally guess (they didn’t even have the first computer or arcade games when this was written) but it really updates the concept visually so it’s easier for audiences to buy into it. This is complementary, visual storytelling done right.

Similarly, there’s a lot of imagination in the way the worlds, characters and situations are rendered. For example, when the androids in the book are talking about the thriving, black market trade, off-world for pre-colonial fiction, you could only really guess at the kind of thing this could be. Here though, it’s lovingly rendered in allusions to science fiction tales across a range of media from our own past in close parodies showing, for instance, the stratosled rockets from the Flash Gordon serials, a scene from the movie version of The Day The Earth Stood Still and a typical pin-up illustration inspired by Edgar Rice Burrough’s John Carter of Mars novels. Which is a really nice touch and the whole comic is full of these lovely little shout outs.

The artist also comes to a certain kind of compromise as to the make up of the androids. They are kind of a cross between the flesh and blood of the movie versions of the replicants but, again, cross-pollinated with the hard, synthetically wired mechanical Andys of the novel. At first I was a little annoyed about this but then I realised that, while Dick was talking about some quite specific machines here... he was also talking about having to give them bone marrow tests as an alternative way to tell if they were androids so, if anything, the artist has tried to clarify Dick’s thoughts into one, stylistic vision. So, in reflection, I don’t really have a problem with it here.

All in all, then, an absolutely brilliant comic book adaptation and a reading experience which was, almost, as moving as the original novel. Okay, so the other bounty hunter from the completely unknown police department, Phil Resch, was envisaged much harder nosed than I recall him from the book but that’s fine... the points he makes and the ideas that he or Deckard or both may actually be androids (something which is definitively disproven in the novel and this comic because, after all it’s about empathising with them, not becoming them) are all here and the androids, unlike the film, never ultimately come off as superior in their ability to empathise with other beings (or rather, their inability). Arguably, this is one of the elements that makes the film great, the fact that the replicants seem to be morally superior to the majority of the humans that populate the movie but Dick’s original intent... the 'absence of appropriate affect' which he was inspired to write about as this novel after reading an excerpt of a journal of a Nazi prison officer complaining that the noisy screams of the people in his concentration camp were keeping him up nights... is equally as powerful and it’s been faithfully adhered to here.

If you like the original novel, you won’t be disappointed with the comic book version of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? If you’ve never read it and are only familiar with the movie version, I think you’ll find this is a fascinating read which will probably make you want to explore the concept further in the book. Either way, this is an excellent attempt at depicting the world of a novel with some pretty hard to adapt sections. Give it a go if you have some time.

Devilina

Devil-in-a Detail

Devilina
Atlas Comics (as Seaboard Periodicals Magazine)
Issues 1 - 2 USA 1975

Devilina... Illustrated Stories of Female-Filled Fantasy!... was one of Atlas Comics attempts to do a black and white comic book magazine in the style of Marvel’s Savage Sword Of Conan or, more than likely in terms of this particular title, something along the lines of Warren’s Vampirella comic magazine. The result is kinda curious and an interesting read but, alas, it obviously didn’t prove as interesting a read with the general public because the title was very short lived, folding after just two issues.

The first issue hit the ground running with an editorial called The Devil’s Dungeon, which talk ed about how the publishers want to adhere to the legacy of ‘fright fraught’ literature (their term, not mine) as popularised by such writers as Poe, Lovecraft and Hawthrone.. so, setting their sights high. However, this seems to be a general editorial column applicable to a range of their mature titles and, somehow, Devilina is conspicuously absent. So that’s all a bit strange. No version of this editorial column appeared in the second issue.

The magazine itself comprised of several short horror stories with the usual shock endings to them plus, first and foremost, a story involving the title character. The first Devilina story, Satan’s Domain, written and drawn by Ric Estrada, tackles her origin as the daughter of Satan’s mother, making them siblings. Satan’s mother is exiled from Hell and raises Devilina as some kind of ‘good witch’ until she reaches her 18th birthday, when she finds some horns on her head... some people might think that, given that she’s explained as having a superior IQ to most people her age, the fact that her mother named her Devilina might have been a bit of a tip off but, what do I know? One of the girls at her college asks if her name is Polish so... yeah. It’s not explained within these two issues if she can retract these horns at will but, since she decides to spend her time graduating from college and majoring in ‘occult journalism’, instead of taking Satan’s offer of ruling in Hell with him, I can only assume that these horns aren’t a permanent fixture. It’s sometimes hard to tell with her hair style. However, Satan is not happy with this arrangement and, after burning her boyfriend to death, sets out to scupper her attempts to live a ‘normal’ life at every turn. He even employs some kind of black arts super sorceress named Corrupta in the Devilina story in the second issue’s lead story, The Curse Of Corrupta. This, not too exciting, chapter of what was never, unfortunately, destined to be referred to as The Devilina Saga, even leaves things on a kind of soft cliff-hanger ending, with Devilina’s best friend and room mate’s body suddenly playing host to Corrupta’s soul. However, like I said... only two issues ever hit newsagents.

Actually, it’s some of the back up stories which are quite a bit more interesting than the title character’s adventures. Especially in the first issue which has, admittedly, a dully plotted story called The Lost Tomb of Nefertiri, dealing with the resurrection of a bandaged up female mummy who seems a not very distant cousin of the one who is so obsessed with Tom Cruise in the 2017 iteration of The Mummy (reviewed here).  The story is uninspired but the artwork by Pablo Marcos is brilliant, utilising some amazingly dynamic page layouts with elements of the panels (many of them open ended panels) over-lapping into other panels and leading the eye through the path of the story. Despite the lack of story pacing, however, the strip does have a nice twist ending.

Of course, twist endings is what both horror and science fiction anthologies are all about and the various stories scattered through the two issues of Devilina are no different. They’re not all exactly unexpected reveals, such as the first issue’s Lay Of The Sea, which features a topless, serial killing mermaid who is captured and raped by the crew of a ship before being left for dead and eventually returning riding a sea monster to deal with the enemies of the one man who stood up for her during her ordeal. I loved the idea that her ‘all male’ victims were found dead with seaweed pulled tight around their necks but there’s a strange jump in the story, although not in the page count, which makes me wonder if this particular tale was either censored or possibly self-censored before publication.

One low point, for me, was a comic strip adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest... which also had some nice art but which, frankly, just reminded me that I really don’t like ‘the bard’s’ writing and I was glad to see the end of it.

The second issue is... well, the Devilina story is a little better than the first (with it’s cliffhanger ending, as detailed earlier) but the supporting stories didn’t really have anything notable about them... which is a hard blow to take when you realise that one of them is a werewolf tale. The theme which I’d barely registered in the first issue but which is much more obvious with the drop in the quality of the stories in the second issue is the reliance on barely consensual sex, rape and brutality to women. Which kinda doesn’t really do much to enhance a positive version of that ‘female-filled fantasy’ the magazine covers proudly proclaim as their mission statement.

Each issue contains one magazine article also, accompanied by a set of illustrations. In the first issue, the subject is modern vampire movies but, it really seems to be an excuse just so the editors can publish some stills from the Hammer Horror films The Vampire Lovers and Twins Of Evil. The slightly longer article in the second issue, presumably to show just how ‘adult’ or ‘mature’ this magazine is when compared to the competitors’ comics, is a fully illustrated review of Flesh Gordon, the soft porn spoof of... well, you know. And talking of their competitors, since Marvel comics were often known as The House Of Ideas, it’s kind of interesting to find adverts for the regular line of Atlas comics in these two issues where they brazenly proclaim themselves to be The New House Of Ideas. One wonders how Marvel took that one.

And, yeah, there’s not much more to tell about these two issues of Devilina. One of many, I am sure, curios of comicdom but they are kinda intriguing and I had a good time with some of the content, despite the misogynistic overtones throughout. Worth picking up, should the opportunity arise, if you are interested in exploring some of the less remembered avenues that comics publishers took in their long history but, perhaps, left alone if the horror anthology format is not your cup of tea.

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.