Category: Science Fiction

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Ignition City


By Warren Ellis, Gianluca Pagliarani & Chris Dreier (Avatar Press)
ISBN: 978-1-59291-087-8

We don’t do clear, wide-eyed optimistic science fiction space opera any more. We’re all much more cynical, defensively sardonic and glumly disappointed: betrayed by the bland Future we inherited rather than the gleaming, enticingly simplistic one we were promised. It’s the 21st century, I still haven’t got my jet-pack and I’m not going to shut up until I get one…

Nevertheless the iconic heroes and villains invented for those now near-extinct Cold-War 20th century tomorrow people still provide the raw material for gripping, evocative post-modern futurist fodder and a few comics creators are truly proficient in blending that cheated Sense of Wonder with modern sensibilities to make whole new science fiction sensations.

One of the better recent modern myth-busting mini masterpieces was a 5-part miniseries from 2010: brainchild of acerbic wunderkind Warren Ellis, whose clear love of all things Wild, Black and Yonder have previously resulted in such superb speculative thrillers as Transmetropolitan, Ministry of Space and Aetheric Mechanics (this last also illustrated by Gianluca Pagliarani, the superbly effective co-creator of the particular space romp under the lens here).

The tale itself is an old and familiar one, but the setting is truly what gives this dark yarn its shockingly addictive appeal. On this Atompunk/Dieselpunk Earth, World War II was cut short when Martians invaded, prompting a couple of explosive decades when square-jawed, burly humans rode rockets to the stars and battled horrendous dictators such as Kharg the Killer, brutal despot of a fantastic alien empire who picked the wrong side when he allied himself with Adolf Hitler…

Now it’s 1956 and the lustre has tarnished for most Terrans regarding space.

With Cold War politics, economic woes and the fear of alien contamination – physical, cultural and social – the planet has turned against space and spacers.

There is only one place on Earth where ships even exist any more – the self-contained enclave island of Ignition City – where all those veteran astronauts grimly await the day when all off-world travel is finally banned.

For young Mary, daughter of interplanetary legend Arthur “Rock” Raven, it’s a cruel fate. Like so many who have been to infinity and beyond, she is addicted to the wonders of the void and the prospect of a life imprisoned on one world is unbearable.

When she gets notification that her dad has died in the interzone settlement ofIgnitionCityshe decides to go there and recover his personal effects – despite strenuous resistance from assorted governments, various Powers-that-be, close friends and her own mother. She has no illusions about her dad or the spacer’s life, but it’s what she wants and she’ll chase any remote chance to hold onto it. Ignoring all that pressure Mary consequently discovers that, as always, nothing is as it seems.

The artificial island is an anarchic hellhole. Draconian military outposts around the coast enclose and isolate a derelict, ramshackle and squalid shanty town of broken beings and beasts from a dozen worlds, eking out an existence amongst the ruins of ships and exotic cosmic technological debris. Everybody seems to be simultaneously waiting for one last chance to get off-world or just die and fade away.

Passing through immigration she first learns how the City is deadly dangerous and that corruption is a way of life as the civil servants confiscate her gun…

In the star-sucking slums, legends of her youth are growing old disgracefully and gradually dying. Saviour of the Universe Lightning Bowman has become the settlement’s chief gunrunner and his once-beloved Gayle Ransom runs a local bar: both eking out a living catering to the daily needs of an army of disillusioned spacers, and aliens trapped by the tide of the times. Their old comrade Doc Vukovic is a crazy hermit now: spending his days prowling the huge junkyards, cobbling together a ship to take him away from the hell of his home world. Violent death is a daily occurrence and only frowned upon because it generates unwelcome paperwork for corrupt Port Authority officials like the jetpack-riding Marshal Pomeroy.

Checking in to the boarding house where her dad died, Mary goes looking for answers and discovers Rock Raven was murdered in his bed. Inspired by discovering the “How”, her efforts to obtain a weapon don’t go as easily, but she’s still determined to stick around and find the “Why” and the “Who”…

Even greedy, paranoid, far-fallen from grace Cosmic Champion Bowman won’t sell her a weapon. He only urges her to get the hell out of the doomed city…

Sticking around and poking her nose in all the wrong places, Mary makes a few unlikely friends but no progress until she reclaims her father’s impervious old briefcase. Deftly manipulating a lock which a lot of people have clearly tried to breach, Mary finds the murdered spacer’s journal – and his fully-charged, highly illegal, honking great, souped-up ray-gun… just the kind of thing specifically prohibited by the authorities.

Now, she thinks, some answers are going to be forthcoming…

Soon, amidst a storm of blood and lethal radiations, she has uncovered why her father died, a sordid government conspiracy involving Humanity’s greatest foe and, with fallen arch-scientist Dragomir Vukovic (builder of the first rocket-ship in history), united the self-loathing, lost and ragged remnants of the Earth’s greatest – and only – star-panning generation to expose the greatest shame of the world which turned its back on the future…

In case you’re dense or just young, this epic space-western classily references, dismantles and reassembles all those glorious heroic archetypes and wonder-men of the pulp science fiction era (complete with cunning conceptual name checks for the iconic characters old farts like me grew up adoring: from the obvious Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to King of the Rocketmen, the Lensmen, Dan Dare and the rest) in a sharp, bleakly nihilistic tale beautifully rendered and crisply told, that still manages to enflame the frustrated simmering dreams in all of us doddery dreamers cheated out of the stars by shoddy tawdry reality…

Harsh, uncompromising and turbulently trenchant, this overwhelmingly entertaining tome also includes a host of design sheets, covers, variants and pin-up pages in a glorious Gallery section to cap off a powerful paean of praise to forgotten tomorrows which long-time sci-fi fans, comic readers and newcomers alike will adore.
© 2010 Avatar Press, Inc. Ignition City and all properties ™ & © 2010 Warren Ellis.

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Fringe


By Zack Whedon, Julia Cho, Mike Johnson, Alex Katsnelson, Danielle DiSpaltro, Matthew Pitts, Kim Cavyan, Tom Mandrake, Simon Coleby & Cliff Rathburn (WildStorm)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-2491-2

Comicbooks always enjoyed a long, successful affiliation and almost symbiotic relationship with television, but in these days when even the ubiquitous goggle-box business is paralysed and endangered by on-demand streaming, too many channels and far too much choice, the numbers and types of program that migrate to funnybooks is increasingly limited.

Excluding kids’ animation shows, cult fantasy adventure series now predominate in this dwindling arena and one such that made an impressive – albeit troubled – transition to the printed page featured the enthrallingly bizarre cases of the FBI’s “Fringe Division” – a joint Federal Task Force assembled to tackle all threats to Homeland Security presented by unexplained phenomena.

Over five seasons from 2008, the TV series wove an intricate tapestry of technological terrors into an overarching grand design starring ex-lab rat and current FBI agent Olivia Dunham, institutionalised experimenter Dr. Walter Bishop and the freshly paroled scientist’s estranged son Peter; who were forced together and given a remarkably free hand to deal with a growing epidemic of ghastly – apparently unconnected – events.

Using government resources and the suspiciously convenient aid of scientific and industrial powerhouse Massive Dynamic – a company formed by Bishop Senior’s old lab partner William Bell – the team every week confronted untold horrors ranging from genetic monsters and abominations, technological terrorists, mad scientists, unsanctioned trans-human experimentation, ancient civilisations, hidden cults, purported alien invasions, time travel, parallel universes and even weirder stuff…

That all sounds like a lot to take in before reading a book cold, but even if you are unaware of the parent series this particular collection, re-presenting stories from the first Fringe 6-issue miniseries, ought to be worth a moment of your time; especially since it was designed as a prequel describing the growing relationship and early exploits of college wonder-kids Bell and Bishop in the heady days before William went incomprehensibly corporate and Walter went dangerously mad…

Moreover each chapter on the road to Fringe (this saga ends with Agent Dunham rescuing the brilliant but bewildered Walter Bishop from a decades-long incarceration in draconian mental hospital St Claire’s – as seen in the television pilot) is supplemented with an eerie many-layered, self-contained instalment depicting the kind of case the unit was formed to combat…

Almost entirely illustrated by the moodily magnificent Tom Mandrake, the dates with destiny begin in ‘Bell and Bishop: Like Minds’, scripted by Zack Whedon & Julia Cho, wherein shy, unassuming young graduate student Walter meets his frivolous future lab partner William Bell. It’s 1974 and Harvard has no idea what the at-first acrimonious odd couple are capable of…

When mystery Man-In-Black Richard Bradbury offers them unlimited resources and absolutely no annoying legal or ethical restrictions to assist in their researches in Quantum Entanglement, the Young Turks – after some initial qualms – soon find themselves at a top-secret private facility in Alaska in the Mike Johnson authored ‘Excellent Soap’.

Although the Fresh Start Soap Company is ostensibly a commercial enterprise, the student geniuses are keenly aware that they’re now working for a clandestine government agency in their quest to create a feasible teleportation device, but are pathetically unprepared for the draconian shop of horrors they find themselves in…

Only sexy scientist Dr. Rachel Matheson seems to be on their side as they plan ‘The Escape’ (written by Alex Katsnelson) but since even their very thoughts are open to the sinister supervisors of the facility, nobody can truly be trusted – even after they make their spectacular, physics-bending getaway…

As Mandrake stepped up the artistic angst, Danielle DiSpaltro & Katsnelson took over for ‘Bell and Bishop: Best Laid Plans’ wherein the older, wiser pair found that they literally can’t refuse a “request” from the US Air Force to examine a potentially alien artefact recovered after a raid in Argentina. With no choice and the temptation of something truly unknown to tinker with the students set to, but realise too late that letting Belly’s dog run loose in the lab was a really bad idea…

Catapulted back to Nazi Germany in 1945, William is forced to admit to his dubious ancestry when ‘It Runs in the Family’ (DiSpaltro & Katsnelson) leads them to a top-secret factory where the artefact was built. Moreover it was designed by a young Wehrmacht genius who would one day beBell’s father…

This section then ends with ‘Bell and Bishop: The Visitor’ (DiSpaltro, Justin Doble, Katsnelson & Mandrake) as, in 2008, outrageously over-medicated psychiatric patient Walter Bishop endures another punishing round of electro-convulsive therapy and refuses to deny the memories we’ve shared for the previous five chapters.

However institute director Sumner is unaware that the FBI agent “treating” his brilliant patient is an impostor tasked with extracting Bishop’s technical secrets and hidden discoveries. Even as the genuine Feds move to have Walter released, the still-brilliant savant is executing his own plans to get free and end his daily torments.

Good thing too – since the fraudulent inquisitor has orders to let nobody else have access to his distraught subject’s drug-drowned memories…

As the main story leads into Walter’s introduction to Olivia, this collection seamlessly slips into the aforementioned Strange Cases beginning with ‘The Prisoner’ scripted by Katsnelson & DiSpaltro with art from Simon Coleby & Cliff Rathburn, wherein a happily-married decent citizen suddenly wakes up in the body of a maximum-security convict – and that’s only his first stop, whilst ‘Strangers on a Train’ (Katsnelson, Matthew Pitts & Mandrake) offers a bewildered spy a terrifying, unending Moebius trip when he has to courier a mysterious device to his unreachable final destination…

On the birth of a baby whose very presence killed everything near him, the Government stepped in and raised the boy in utter isolation and in the interests of National Security. ‘Run Away’ by Johnson & Mandrake showed what happened years later after the lad had grown into a rebellious teenager, desperate for human contact and smart enough to escape from the High Security lab he’d always been penned in.

In ‘Space Cowboy’ (Kim Cavyan & Mandrake) a celebrated Astronaut’s unexpected death revealed some unwelcome effects about the “vitamins” his superiors had been making him take, and this chilling thrilling compendium closes with ‘Hard Copy’ by Johnson & Mandrake and the final shocking scoop of TV journalist Michelle Taylor whose sensation-chasing “weird science” reports always led her back to the Global Good Guys corporation Massive Dynamic.

It was such a shame she never paid better attention to the stories she broadcast or remembered that nobody was irreplaceable. Still, no one noticed when she was…

Dark, clever and immensely entertaining in the classic conspiracy theory mould, this book is a smart and very readable fiction-feast even for those with no knowledge of the source material, whilst fans of the show will reap huge extra enjoyment dividends by talking a sneaky peek into this catalogue of the unknown…
© 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved. Fringe and all characters, distinctive likenesses and related elements are ™ of Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

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R.E.B.E.L.S. volume 2: Strange Companions


By Tony Bedard, Andy Clarke, Claude St. Aubin, Karl Moline, Derec Donovan, Kalman Andrasofszky & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 987-1-4012-2761-6

Once upon a time, DC’s vast pantheon of characters was sensibly scattered, segregated and wholly distinct: separated and situated on a variety of alternate Earths which comprised Golden Age hold-overs, contemporaneous Silver Age stars and later-created heroes. Further Earths were subsequently introduced for every superhero stable the company scooped up in a voracious and protracted campaign of acquisition over the decades. Charlton, Fawcett, Quality Comics and others’ characters resided upon their own globes, occasionally meeting in trans-dimensional alliances and apparently deterring new readers from getting on with DC.

Latterly, when DC retconned their entire ponderous continuity following Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985-1986, ejecting the entire concept of a multiverse and re-knitting time so that there had only been one world literally festooned with heroes and villains, many of their greatest characters got a unique restart, with the conceit being that the characters had been around for years and the readership were simply tuning in on just another working day.

Of course now the multiverse concept is back and not confusing at all (no! seriously?) but whatever the original reasons, that dramatic 1980s refit did provide for some utterly astounding and cleverly cohesive stories…

In the aftermath of that event, the hero-packed planet Earth was targeted by a coalition of alien races and endured a full-on Invasion which was repulsed by the indomitable resistance of the World’s assembled heroes and villains and a few selected extraterrestrial allies. When the cosmic dust settled a few of these stayed together and formed cops-for-profit outfit dubbed L.E.G.I.O.N., led by a lying, scheming, manipulative obsessive super-genius bastard named Vril Dox: notional son of the villainous super-villain Brainiac of Colu and one of the most superciliously smug creatures in creation.

Overcoming all odds and the general distaste of his own chief lieutenants, Dox moulded his organisation into a force for justice and peace in the universe, with over 80 client worlds happily prospering, until his own son Lyrl – whilst still a baby – usurped control of the organisation: hunting Vril and his core agent team across the universe as desperate R.E.B.E.L.S. ruthlessly pursued by their own intergalactic commercial police force.

By the end of that run of comicbooks in 1996, order and the status quo were fully restored and the Licensed Extra-Governmental Interstellar Operatives Network went back to scrupulously and competently doling out all the peace and security solvent worlds could afford…

In the first volume, Dox’s organisation was snatched from his implacable grasp by an alien incursion from another galaxy, led by a terrifying mystery despot who had apparently subjugated the predatory Starros and turned their mind-sucking, power-leeching abilities to the creation of an unbelievably vast inter-galactic empire, policed by an unstoppable host of super-slaves and subservient legions.

Acting upon information received from his own descendent in the 31st century, Dox began assembling a super-powered strike force from across known space: old allies and pawns, new heroes – and even villains and monsters. Whoever he couldn’t coerce or co-opt Dox created, such as with the crippled Anasazi girl he transformed into a ball of sentient space-spanning energy he dubbed Wildstar…

However, just as he was compiling his arsenal of living weapons and preparing to take back control of L.E.G.I.O.N., events overtook him again. From far outside our galaxy an impossible army of invaders burst through a space rift, all enslaved by and connected to a telepathic starfish creature named Starro, yet somehow controlled by a humanoid master who had learned how to psychically dominate the universally-feared pentagram predators…

Within hours the Armada had destroyed the impregnable homeworld of the dreaded Dominators and were preparing to spread across the Milky Way, until Dox, with typical reckless brilliance, locked the entire quadrant within an impenetrable forcefield stalling the invasion by trapping hundreds of worlds – and his ragtag R.E.B.E.L.S. unit with them – in an inescapable cage with the most rapacious creatures in creation…

Collecting issues #7-9 of the revived comicbook series and the first R.E.B.E.L.S. Annual: Starro the Conqueror (all from 2009), the drama is scripted as ever by Tony Bedard and continues with ‘No Way Out’ (illustrated by Andy Clarke) wherein the only Dominator to escape the fall of his own species’ ancient empire goes hunting for allies and revenge. Dox too is seeking outside help – with as little success – from planetary dictators such as Despero or Kanjar Ro and extremist regimes such as the bellicose Khunds: all elements he used to be paid good money to keep away from decent sentients and his client worlds…

The aquatic, methane breathing mega-teleporters of Gil’Dishpan at least agreed to a meeting with both Dox and the Dominator, keenly aware that their inherent space-shifting capabilities presented Starro’s forces with an irresistible opportunity to break out of the vast but impenetrable force cage frustrating their outward expansion…

The venal Gil’Dishpan had actually planned to give their diplomatic guests to Starro in return for a neutrality pact but the invaders instead attacked the methane-dwellers, ultimately forcing Dox and the last Dominator to make absolutely sure no teleporters remained for the starfish to mind-control…

In ‘Stealth’ (Clarke art again) the ragtag band of resistors track down the banished and now teenaged Lyrl Dox, press-ganging the former tiny tyrant into the fight just as Starro’s metahuman brigade turned their unstoppable attentions upon the Khundish empire – with the now inevitable result of total submission through horrendous bloodshed.

On another front the insidious Psions contrived a ghastly biological cloaking mechanism and despatched the far-from happy Omega Men through the still-open space rift to the Horde’s mysterious point of origin…

The titular ‘Strange Companions’ – lavishly rendered by Claude St. Aubin & Scott Hanna – pulls more threads into the swiftly expanding cosmic tapestry as Wildstar goes in search of other allies trapped within the contained quadrant whilst the Omega Men discover disquieting, unsuspected secrets on the other side of the sky.

As Starro lieutenant Smite personally crushes all resistance on Kanjar Ro’s fortress world Dhor, the dictator is rescued at the last moment by his archenemy Adam Strange, another recruit to Dox’s resistance movement as is Earthling mutant superman Captain Comet.

The assembled rebels don’t have long to catch their breath however as the frustrated Smite arrives in blockbusting manner leading a squad of Starro super-soldiers and tasked with capturing – or is that liberating? – Lyrl Dox: a lad who’s been correctly assessed as even smarter and more ruthless than the father he’s always hated…

To Be Continued…

The rest of this volume reprints the Annual; offering a quintet of tales uncovering secrets and disclosing hidden facts about the unbeatable enemy forces. The eponymous framing sequence ‘Starro the Conqueror’ (illustrated by St. Aubin & Hanna) connects five powerfully revelatory chapters beginning with ‘The Doom that Came to Kalanor’ as the supreme master of the invaders personally destroys the diabolical Despero – a brutal juggernaut who has killed billions in his day. That day, though, is soon done…

The action continues by revealing the backgrounds of the pitiless, uncompromising invaders beginning with the tragic ‘Daughter of Storms’ (with art from Karl Moline & Mark Pennington): life-giving goddess of a world who lost everything when the starfish landed in her skies…

This is followed by an introduction to the worst Starro can offer as St. Aubin & Hanna convene ‘The High Vanguard’: brutal monsters who serve the as the semi-autonomous elite of the rapacious Horde, after which Derec Donovan delineates the story of Smite who was ‘Scourge of the Stars’ even before falling to the unrelenting overlord of infinity…

This volume concludes with the horrific origin of ‘The Star Conqueror’ (art by Kalman Andrasofszky) which shows how a gentle holy man defeated an intolerable invading interplanetary predator and unwittingly unleashed a far greater menace upon all of creation…

With a spectacular cover gallery by Andy Clark & Andrasofszky, this slim tome offers a deliciously intoxicating blend of space opera and cosmic action that will push every button for lovers of staggering science fiction thrills, cut with sharp, mature dialogue and sublimely beautiful artwork. More straight and simple, mind-boggling, slyly cynical, riotous rollercoaster fun no fan of fantasy should do without…
© 2009, 2010 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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R.E.B.E.L.S. volume 1: the Coming of Starro


By Tony Bedard, Andy Clarke, Claude St. Aubin, Scott Hanna & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 987-1-4012-2589-6

Once upon a time, DC’s vast pantheon of characters was sensibly scattered, segregated and wholly distinct: separated and situated on a variety of alternate Earths which comprised Golden Age hold-overs, contemporaneous Silver Age stars and later-created heroes. Further Earths were subsequently introduced for every superhero stable the company scooped up in a voracious and protracted campaign of acquisition over the decades. Charlton, Fawcett, Quality Comics and others characters resided upon their own globes, occasionally meeting in trans-dimensional alliances and apparently deterring new readers from getting on with DC.

Latterly, when DC retconned their entire ponderous continuity following Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985-1986, ejecting the entire concept of a multiverse and re-knitting time so that there had only been one world literally festooned with heroes and villains, many of their greatest characters got a unique restart, with the conceit being that the characters had been around for years and the readership were simply tuning in on just another working day.

Of course now the multiverse concept is back and not confusing at all (no! seriously?) but whatever the original reasons, that dramatic 1980s refit did provide for some utterly astounding and cleverly cohesive stories…

In the aftermath of that event, the hero-packed planet Earth was targeted by a coalition of alien races and endured a full-on Invasion which was repulsed by the indomitable resistance of the World’s assembled heroes and villains and a few selected extraterrestrial allies. When the cosmic dust settled a few of these stayed together and formed cops-for-profit outfit dubbed L.E.G.I.O.N., led by a lying, scheming, manipulative obsessive super-genius bastard named Vril Dox: notional son of the villainous super-villain Brainiac of Colu and one of the most superciliously smug creatures in creation.

Overcoming all odds and the general distaste of his own chief lieutenants, Dox moulded his organisation into a force for justice and peace in the universe, with over 80 client worlds happily prospering, until his own son Lyrl – whilst still a baby – usurped control of the organisation: hunting Vril and his core agent team across the universe as desperate R.E.B.E.L.S. ruthlessly pursued by their own intergalactic commercial police force.

By the end of that run of comicbooks in 1996, order and the status quo were fully restored and the Licensed Extra-Governmental Interstellar Operatives Network went back to scrupulously and competently doling out all the peace and security solvent worlds could afford…

All that background is largely superfluous to the enjoyment of this latest iteration of the splendidly wry and cynical sci fi adventure series as history repeated itself in 2008, and another cosmic event forced DC’s assorted space sentinels into action again. Adam Strange, the Omega Men, Captain Comet and Dox’s L.E.G.I.O.N. again came to the fore and their intergalactic exploits again began to impinge on the fate of this island Earth…

Collecting the first six issues of the revived R.E.B.E.L.S. comicbook series concocted by scripter Tony Bedard, the superbly intoxicating action begins in ‘The Future is Now’ (illustrated by Andy Clarke) as a fugitive Vril Dox crashes on Earth fleeing from a team of bounty hunters.

To ensure no further insurrections by greedy – or worse yet, moralistic – employees, the 10th Level Intellect had largely replaced all his annoyingly autonomous agents with robotic units, but that had simply enabled some bright spark to co-opt his entire intergalactic army – again! – and Dox was now a target for assassination by L.E.G.I.O.N.’s new owner, as well as many of the criminals and warlords the Coluan had previously antagonised…

Within mere moments of reaching our embattled world Dox, hotly pursued by monstrous alien powerhouse Tribulus, its cyborg controller Getorix, super-psychic Skwaul and former elite L.E.G.I.O.N.-ary Amon Hakk, is confronted by Supergirl, keen on stopping the sheer carnage caused by the invaders’ battles.

Freshly returned from an extended stay in the 31st century, the teenaged Kryptonian had been turned into the unwitting receptacle of a message from Dox’s distant descendent Brainiac 5, conveying data and specifications for Vril to construct a precursor brigade of the Legion of Super-Heroes to combat an imminent threat to the universe…

Dox, contrary as ever, was more impressed with the files on the LSH’s terrifying enemies…

Elsewhere the outlaw warriors dubbed the Omega Men had learned of Dox’s predicament and become aware what a powerful, if untrustworthy, ally he would make…

The action resumed at the South Pole as the ousted Coluan cop and the Girl of Tomorrow defeated the alien hunters and turned the nigh-mindless Tribulus into ‘The First Recruit’. Dox then fled Earth in search of fresh cannon-fodder for his future-foretold team and exploited rather than allied himself with the Omega Men before heading to a lost colony of Amerindian ex-slaves for his next target.

Nearly a millennium before, an entire tribe of Native Americans had been stolen and dumped on the distant world Starhaven where they had evolved into the Anasazi, winged trackers of immense power and sensitivity. Now Dox arrived and offered to give a weak and feeble outcast the gifts fate and feeble genetics had denied her. However, even though he kept his word, the thing that Wildstar became had good reason to regret her devil’s bargain…

‘A World of Hurt’ saw the new R.E.B.E.L.S. take the battle to the usurped L.E.G.I.O.N. hierarchy; along the way picking up old comrade and dedicated Dox-hater Strata – a woman of living stone and high moral standards – plus energetic new recruit Bounder.

Just as the robotic forces now commanded by artificial life-form and ambulatory computer server Silica begin mercilessly eradicating anybody connected with the Coluan’s old organisation, the utterly dispensible Omega Men attack L.E.G.I.O.N.’s HQ on Maltus and destroy the traitorous living computer which had taken over the organisation.

Covertly despatched by the manipulative Dox, the Omegans have inadvertently handed back control of the rent-a-cops to Dox, but in the digital woman’s corpse the victors find the first clues as to the real threat: an eerie starfish creature capable of controlling anything it possesses. Tragically, before they can react another Starro beast arrives – wearing the body of a brutal alien war goddess named Astrid Storm-Daughter…

With Claude St. Aubin & Scott Hanna taking over the art chores, ‘From Beyond’ kicks the already fast-paced thriller into maximum overdrive as Amon Hakk, Getorix and Skwaul are rescued from earthly imprisonment by Durlan shapeshifter Ciji, unaware that Dox is no longer the problem…

On Maltus, the surviving Omega Men narrowly escape the new threat but discover the entire planet – the most populous in the galaxy – has been taken: each citizen wearing a Starro seed and contributing their enslaved psychic resources to a hidden master…

Meanwhile in another part of space the aggressive space faring hive-culture known as the Dominators are also under attack by the Starro slaves. However this is unlike any previous incursion by the frequently occurring stellar starfish: there’s an implacable devouring consciousness behind the assaults. Even the inimical, scientifically sadistic Psions are scared – as evidenced by their rescuing of their greatest enemies the Omega Men – and propose an alliance to defeat a threat that is pouring into our galaxy from a cosmic hole into another existence…

As ‘The Stars We Are’ opens, in the strategically crucial Xylon Expanse a vast subspace rift is disgorging a host of ships and super-powered slaves into one of the most populous areas of the galaxy – and a centre of L.E.G.I.O.N. influence. Even as the Dominator’s mighty empire falls in hours, Astrid Storm-Daughter attacks Dox’s ship just as Ciji’s forces arrive. With all sentient life threatened, this initial collection concludes with the superb ‘Dominator’ as Dox again pulls an intellectual rabbit out of his hat and traps the entire invasion force – and their space rift – behind an impenetrable, quadrant-wide force field. Locked within an inescapable, parsecs-wide box of force, the terrifying humanoid master of the Starros is safely contained in a relatively small buffer zone and prevented from all further expansion.

Of course stuck on the wrong side of the fence with him are Dox, his unwilling newfound enemies-turned-allies and billions of potential slave-sentients on hundreds of sitting-duck worlds…

To Be Continued…

With a spectacular cover gallery by Andy Clark, Ed Benes, Rob Hunter, Kalman Andrasofszky, this slim tome offers a deliciously intoxicating blend of space opera and cosmic Fights ‘n’ Tights action that will push every button for fans of staggering science fiction thrills, cut with sharp, mature dialogue and sublimely beautiful artwork. Plain and simple rip-roaring, rollercoaster rocket riding fun that no devotee of the genres should miss…

© 2009, 2010 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

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Secret Identities


By Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, Jerry Ma & various (The New Press)
ISBN: 978-1-59558-824-1

A little while ago I reviewed Shattered: a splendid anthology of superhero-related stories by and about Asian Americans which, although self-contained, stemmed out of a previous and equally innovative Fights ‘n’ Tights assemblage. Secret Identities was designed to craft an alternative American history and milieu for heroes and villains more in tune with the needs and interests of a vast, neglected sector of the Republic’s readership, and having acquired a copy of that previous tome – still available and worth every penny – I thought I’d share a few further details with you…

Devised and supervised by life-long fans and mature creative types Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow & Jerry Ma, Secret Identities blends enchantingly intimate thoughts and reminiscences about the comics we all grew up knowing with a decidedly fresh approach to old plots, characters and treatments. Featuring the talents of exclusively Asian American creators from comics, the arts, design and computer gaming who smartly re-examine the USA’s signature sequential narrative genre from the social, cultural perspective of a non-WASP, non-Jewish experience, this compilation is a sharply different yet familiar take on the marvellous world of Men in Tights and Women in Control…

Following a close-knit over-arching timeline the book opens with a wonderful Marvel Comics Spoof – The Y-Men #1 – as the editors recall their childhood love affair with costumed characters and reveal how the project really got started. ‘Preface: In the Beginning’ by Jeff Yang & Jef Castro leads seamlessly into the Brave New World as ‘Prologue’ and ‘Driving Steel’ by Yang & Benton Jew take us to the 19th century American West, where immigrant workers struggle to build the trans-continental railroad and Irish Navvies ruthlessly compete with their Chinese counterparts. Sabotage, skulduggery and ill-will run rampant, and only little Negro lad John Henry is party to the fiery true nature of indomitable – and undying – labourer Master Jimson Fo…

‘S.A.M. meets Larry Hama’ by Tak Toyoshima is a breezy interview with the venerable veteran creator on the sense of cartoon affirmative action, after which the saga proper continues with ‘Section One: War and Remembrance’ as Parry Shen & Alexander Tarampi begin to examine the fictional history of Asian American mystery men and metahumans during WWII.

‘9066’ by Jonathan Tsuei & Jerry Ma then details the tragedy of a dedicated crusader who couldn’t get his country to look beyond the colour of his skin and shape of his eyes, whilst in ‘Heroes Without a Country’ (Daniel Jai Lee & Vince Sunico) the same anti-Jap furore almost deprived American super-unit the Sunset Squad of their most valuable asset when raiding a Nazi laboratory of horror…

‘Gaman’ by Jamie Ford & Tarampi reveals the generational fallout of those embattled days to a modern student who learns the hard way just what makes him so different from his school friends, whilst in ‘The Hibakusha’ Shen & Glenn Urieta reveal the secrets and latent dangers of the children born from the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So amazing were they that America’s interned them in Area 52 for years…

Marvel, DC and others generously allowed their characters to appear in the autobiographical sections of this collection, and a big-name writer and movie-maker shared a few insights about creativity with Keith Chow & A. L. Baroza in ‘Re-Directing Comics: Greg Pak’ before debuting his spectacular tension-drenched anti-hero after President Obama pardoned a dishonoured hero and potential assassin in ‘The Citizen’ by Pak & Bernard Chang…

‘Sidekicks: Gene Yang & Michael Kang’ finds the editors debating the Asiatic ghetto of faithful retainerdom (Chow & Baroza) after which ‘The Blue Scorpion & Chung’ by Yang & Sonny Liew provides an outrageous and wryly hilarious alternative to the traditional set-up, whilst the tragic story of ‘James’ (Kang & Erwin Haya) shows that the solution is usually in the assistant’s hands all the time…

‘Section Two: When Worlds Collide’ opens with another take on the strange visitor from an alien world scenario, courtesy of Chow & Chi-Yun Lau, after which another long-established comics creator speaks out in ‘Now There’s Something: Greg LaRoque’ (Chow & Alexander Shen), which leads into a compelling genre-bending fantasy of good, evil and family peccadilloes with ‘Trinity’ written and drawn by LaRoque himself.

‘No Exit’ by Naeem Mohaiemen & Urieta is a beautifully sharp examination of dignity and morality set in a Guantanamo-style camp not so very different from the shamefully real one, whilst ‘S.O.S.’ blends outsourcing to India with the back-office requirements of the busy, cost-conscious American superhero crowd in a delightful yarn from Tanuj Chopra & Alex Joon Kim.

Many of the tales in this tome take place in the modern metropolis of Troy, although New York City is the eventual location of Clarence Koo & Jerry Ma’s ‘The Wallpasser’, which mixes people-trafficking and illegal immigration with dark, super-normal forces and broken families before ‘Section Three: Girl Power’ takes a look at the distaff side of culture and super-society, starting with a hilarious silent and salutary fable from Kripa Joshi, whilst ‘You Are What You Eat’ (Lynn Chen & Paul Wei) finds a cake-loving lass given the greatest possible gift by her aged grandmother… and she can fight crime with it too…

‘Sampler’ by Jimmy Aquino & Haya also confronts long-held assumptions and prejudice when a Troy laundry/dry cleaning store frequented by costumed heroes provides a shy retiring seamstress with the opportunity to use her own long-unsuspected super-power, whilst ‘Learn to Share’ by Keiko Agena & Ming Doyle offers a disturbing look at the ethnic adoption experience through the malfunctioning eyes of a little girl with a dark past and terrifying power…

‘A Day at CostumeCo’ by Yang & Baroza introduces a magical family of metas-in-waiting in a masterfully enticing riff on the theme of superhero dynasties. When Vernon and Vivie Chang finally get rebellious big sister Valerie to accept her true nature All Heck breaks loose, after which Hellen Jo discusses the nature of female furies in ‘Supergrrrls’ before Jason Sperber & Chi-Yun Lau open ‘Section Four: Many Masks’; examining the nature of assumed identities in advance of a brief colour section introducing a barrage of new characters and concepts in one-page pinups.

Meta-merc ‘Agent Orange’ by Dustin Tri Nguyen & Dustin Nguyen is followed by supernatural judge ‘Gaze’ (Sung Kang, Billy Tan, Walden Wong & Sean Ellery) and acupuncture-activated go-girl ‘Flight’ by Ian Kim & Jeff Yang. Adulation-powered ‘Shine’ (Leonardo Nam, Anthony Tan & Ruben de Vela) and immortal avenger ‘Jia’ (Kelly Hu, Mark Allen & Cliff Chiang) are followed by Yul Kwon & Deodato Pangandoyon’s escaped North Korean lab rat ‘Cataclysm’ and one-man alien invasion resister ‘Go’ by Kazu Kibuishi, after which Anthony Wu’s army-of-one ‘Parallel Penny’ closes the file on this tantalising taster of things – hopefully – to come…

Returning to moody monochrome, ‘Section Five: Ordinary Heroes’ begins with Raymond Sohn depicting real folks’ definition of heroes before ‘Just Ordinary’ by Nick Huang & Shen takes a trenchant look at society and the media’s unhelpful expectations of what constitutes a champion, whilst ‘Twilight’ (Ted Chung & Anuj Shrestha) takes a hard look at alienation and self-discovery amidst the aftermath of disaster, and only a little time-travelling intervention at last saves ‘David Kim’ from his annoying match-making parents in a light and lovely super-folks RomCom by John Kuramota & Christine Norrie…

‘Meet Joe’ by Koji Steven Sakai & John Franzese shows how a determined kid-hero can buck both public expectations and family pressure, little So-Geum at last develops a super-power ‘On the Third Day’ (Johann Choi) – although not in the way his pushy parents wanted – and ‘Long’ perfectly captures the sheer exuberant joy of extra abilities in a brash bold pantomime by Martin Hsu. The chapter then closes with ‘Justified’ by Ken Wong & Tiffanie Hwang as a young hopeful innocently upsets ingrained ignorance and complacency during an open audition for aspiring mystery men…

‘Section Six: From Headline to Hero’ commences with a discussion of real-world American Asian heroes by Parry Shen & Jeremy Arambulo, after which ’16 Miles’ by Shen & Sarah Sapang extrapolates a poignant story of love and sacrifice in the midst of total terror whilst ‘Taking Back Troy’ (Yang & Francis Tsai) shows the downside of living with superhumans as a school party night goes tragically bad, before the action ends on a promising introductory note as ‘Peril: By the Time I Get to Arizona’ (Chow & Castro) introduces a desperate young man dragged into a world of impossible danger when the father he never knew goes missing and is branded a traitor. Dr. Won Kin Lun was the world’s greatest authority on super-powers and nano-tech and everybody wants his discoveries – except the unwilling, angry, betrayed son he secretly, arbitrarily inflicted them upon…

In ‘Epilogue’ Yang & Castro pensively wrap things up and consider the future but there’s still much to enjoy here. After full contributor biographies the added attractions start with ‘The One that Got Away’ by Larry Hama and there’s also a selection of Behind the Scenes concept art as well as ‘Our Favourite “Dear John” Letter’ – a brilliant manga cartoon apology for not contributing from eventual and actual contributor Jeremy Arambulo. The immersive experience then ends with a complete time-line chart and annotated score-card, ranging from the portentous beginnings in the 1800s to the unleashed future of 2020 and beyond.

Combining the best aspects of many storytelling traditions and artistic styles, utilised by a volunteer army of talented creators whose origins stem from Asia, India and all points East but whose ethnicity is definitely All-American, Secret Identities began a bold experiment in cultural assimilation that will amaze comics fans in search of something a little different…
Compilation © 2009 Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow and Jerry Ma. Individual pieces © 2009 each author. All rights reserved.

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Shattered: the Asian American Comics Anthology – A Secret Identities Book


By Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, Jerry Ma & various (The New Press)
ISBN: 978-1-59558-824-1

The very best thing about old comics periodicals, and a factor sadly deficient in most graphic novels these days, is the lack of variety. Those venerable weeklies and monthlies were generally stuffed with different strips and features offering a host of entertainment options that contemporary books just can’t match.

That’s certainly not the case in this marvellous collection of new stories supervised by Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow and Jerry Ma, who first came to Funnybook fans’ attention in 2009 with the satirical shared-universe superhero book Secret Identities. That tome showcased the talents of exclusively Asian American creators in comics amalgamating the US industry’s signature genre with the social, cultural and entertainment influences of a non-WASP, non-Jewish (it’s easy to argue that the American comicbook was primarily invented by immigrants – and largely Jewish ones at that) talent pool to produce a whole new take on the sequential narrative experience.

Now this fresh collection expands on that initial offering with new adventures set in that New Universe, as well as many sidebar and only notionally linked cartoon yarns, from a host of gifted writers and artists whose origins and ethnicity stem from Asia, India and all points East.

An overarching storyline links the tales here as the Eastern archetypes which permeate Western fiction – the Brute, the Brain, the Temptress, the Alien and the Manipulator – are reclaimed and transformed into the motivating force which links the Secret Identities tale into one longer epic, with each chapter then supplemented by additional, less canonical strips.

Thus the prologue set up of ‘The Sacrifice’ written by Yang, Shen & Chow and illustrated by Ma introduces a quintet of otherworldly demons who want to break back into our helpless world. Bo-Kwun the Manipulator, Kum-Sau the Brute, Zhi-Lik the Brain, Yi-Heung the Alien and Ngau-Yun the Temptress – collectively known as Ng Duk, the Five Venoms – were long ago banished and barred by two ancient Djinn heroes. Their tenuous triumph is now sustained by a cult of ever vigilant warrior priests…

The saga further builds in ‘Burn’, by Jimmy & Jerry Ma, as a masked westerner in 19th century China brought poisonous flowers to destroy the people’s way of life, even contaminating the soul of their greatest champion The Commissioner…

The story proper begins in America during the Gold Rush with ‘The Brute – Driving Steel: the Breaking’ by Yang & Krishna M. Sadasivam, as wandering oriental outcast Ifrit and his negro partner John Henry are tricked into breaking the Mirror of Divine Immortals and release the Five Venoms…

Tangential follow-ups then offer a new perspective on an old story in ‘Master Tortoise & Master Hare’ by Howard Wong & Jamie Noguchi, Bernard Chang’s ‘Showtime’ begins a demonic basketball battle resolved on the artist’s own website, whilst ‘Solitary’ (Michael Kang, Edmund Lee & Glenn Urieta) examines the contemporary gang scene and family bonds before ‘Clean Getaway’ (Jamie Ford & A.L. Baroza) perfectly pastiches EC crime comics, complete with faux cover from Tales of the Orient #12…

‘The Temptress’ leads off the next chapter of the ongoing epic with ‘Bai, Bai, Bai Tsai’ by Yang, Martin Hsu & Sophia Lin as the creators reference manga styles to relate how second generation kid heroes Magical Girl, Super Deformed and Hell Kitty solve an ancient mystery and uncover sinister exploitation involving a cancelled cartoon show after which ‘Ching Shih, Queen of Pirates’, by Natalie Kim & Robin Ha, details the history of a 19th century demimonde who uniquely took control of her own destiny.

Another kind of seductress figures in the bittersweet romantic fable ‘The Regrets We Talk About’ by Fred Chao whilst ‘Heroes Without a Country: Tokyo Rose’ from Daniel Jae Lee & Dafu Yu provides a delightfully smart WWII superhero spy-thriller and Amy Chu, Larry Hama & Craig Yeung cleverly recall a bad time for Japanese-American Nisei in ‘The Date’…

A full-colour glossy ‘Gallery’ of concepts and characters follows featuring art and synopses for ‘Adam Warrock’ by Eugene Ahn & Ming Doyle, ‘Revolution Shuffle’ by Bao Phi & GB Tran, ‘Tempest’ from Kai Ma & Eric Kim, ‘The Walkman’ hilariously conceived by Aaron Takahashi & Mukesh Singh, ‘Angry Asian Man’ Phil Yu & Jerry Ma, the utterly enchanting ‘Mei the Alien’ by Koji Steven Sakai & Deodata Pangandoyon, ‘Camp Mech’ by Eric Nakamura & Sara Saedi, and Thenmozhi Soundararajan & Saumin Suresh Patel’s ‘The Death Stalker’…

‘The Brain’ then takes centre stage for the unfolding epic in ‘Hide and Sikh’ from Parry Shen & Jeremy Arambulo wherein the atomic children born of the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki grow into their dormant power and uncover a huge secret of metahuman genesis…

The remainder of the chapter then focuses on the dreaming world described by ‘The Power of Petunia’ (Joy Osmanski & Yasmin Liang), Paul Wei & Chi-Yun Lau’s classy future shocker ‘Drones and Droids’, a parable of High School popularity contests resulting in ‘Camden’s Revenge’ by Keiko Agena & Louie Chin and a darkly traumatic decision made in ‘Metatron’ by Stuart Ng.

Possibly my very favourite tale in this masterful monochrome compilation is Greg Pak & Takeshi Miyazawa’s ‘Los Robos, Arizona’, joyously referencing the wide-eyed wonder of manga boys and their giant alien Mecha as a young cadet is selected by fate to befriend an incredible metal visitor, whilst Ford & Baroza again charm with new nostalgia in ‘A Cut Above’ parodying EC horror with a snippet from Weird Asian Science #46…

The over-epic resumes with ‘The Alien’ in ‘Peril: Welcome to the Terror’ from Keith Chow & Jerry Castro, returning to Goldfield, Arizona in 1900 and an outrage against the Chinese immigrant workers, before jumping to today and a manhunt for a misunderstood hero steeped in the horrors of then and the technology of tomorrow…

Kripa Joshi then takes a swingeing pot-shot at a culture of callous bullying in ‘Miss Moti, Shattered’, Johann Choi reveals the darkness of ‘The Stranger’ and Traci Honda deliciously, wordlessly plays childish games with ‘Personal Monsters’.

Tanji Chopra & Alice Meichi Li take a long dark look at the sordid future of negotiable affection in ‘Weightless’, whilst Angela Veronica Wong, Reinhardt Suarez, Christine Norrie & Craig Yeung explore the endless anticipation of kid superhumans and their insatiable aspirations in ‘A Dream of Flying’, before ‘Fashion Never Dyes’ again displays Ford & Baroza’s delight with EC thrillers by providing a shocker from the tragically non-existent Uncanny Tales of the Yellow Peril #27.

‘The Manipulator’ at last steps up in ‘Hibakusha: Secrets’ by Shen & Sean Chen as a determined team of atomic heroes uncover the clandestine nature of the Arizona scandal in a spectacular action adventure, whilst the ancillary aspects include ‘Push’ (Jennifer S. Fang, Ace Continuado & Julian San Juan) which reveals what happens when Yankee superhero brawn meets studious Asian serial killer planning, whilst ‘Persons of Mass Destruction’, by Gary Jackson & Cesar P. Castillo, offers a chilling dose of metahuman realpolitik in relation to the “threat” of North Korea.

Also on view are Ren Hsieh & Bryan Lee’s alien incursion ‘The Merciful’, stunning kung fu doomsday parable ‘Qi Lai!’ by Roger Ma, Dheeraj Verma & Tak Toyoshima, the indescribably odd ‘Occupy Ethnic Foods’ courtesy of a solo flying Toyoshima, and the gloriously hip strip featuring the maternal tribulations of a rather harried ‘Shadow Hero’ by Gene Luen Yang & Sonny Liew…

Yang, Shen, Chow & Urieta then bring it all to a triumphal finale in ‘The Sealing’ as the disparate heroes unite to battle the Five Venoms and restore the Mirror of Divine Immortals through an ultimate sacrifice or two, wrapping up this stirring and staggeringly impressive anthology celebration in grand manner.

Finally the publishing project further underscores its debt of thanks to the constantly-changing nature of the American Experiment in illustrated Epilogue. ‘The Vilcek Story’ (by Jeff Yang & Wendy Xu) précis the history of the family of Czechoslovakian Jews who fled to the USA during the years of Nazi atrocity and, after building successful lives, set up a foundation which celebrates and supports the ongoing immigrant experience – and funded this collection…

Combining the best aspects of a vast panoply of storytelling traditions and artistic styles, Shattered is a bold experiment in identity and assimilation that will amaze comics fans in search of something a little different…
Compilation © 2012 Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow and Jerry Ma. Individual pieces © 2012 each author. All rights reserved.

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Planetes volume 2


By Makoto Yukimura, translated and adapted by Yuki Nakamura & Anna Wenger (TokyoPop)
ISBN: 978-1-59182-509-8

These days nobody does gritty, authentic, fun hard-tech comics science fiction like the Japanese (although for sheer tight-lipped underplayed drama I’d still place Sydney Jordan’s Jeff Hawk, Frank Hampson’s Dan Dare and most of Warren Ellis’ SF work ahead of even Manga’s greatest masters…).

The tough, no-nonsense, gritty mystery and refined imagination of space travel – so much a component of immediate post-World War II industrial society in the West – began to once again captivate a legion of level-headed imagineers at the end of the 20th century when Japanese tales first began to be translated into English. One superb exponent of that mini-boom was relative newcomer Makoto Yukimura who rekindled interest in near-space exploration in all its harsh and grimy glory with an inspiring “nuts-and-bolts” manga series which scrupulously explored the probable rather than the possible…

Yukimura (born in Yokohamain 1976, just as the once-ambitious American space program was languishing in cash-strapped doldrums and five long years before the first space shuttle launch) began his professional life as an assistant to veteran creator Shin Morimura before launching his independent career with the Planetes.

Working exclusively for Kodansha, his award-winning premier Seinen series ran in Weekly Morning magazine from January 1999-January 2004 and was later collected as four tankōbon volumes. The serial easily made the jump to a popular anime series and since then Yukimura, after producing Sayōnara ga Chikai node for Evening magazine, has since 2005 abandoned the future for the past and concentrated his creative energies on the monolithic historical epic Vinland Saga – serialized in Weekly Shōnen Magazine and Afternoon – and filling 11 bloodcurdling volumes to date…

The grimly existential premise of Planetes is devilishly simply and powerfully engaging. Humanity is a questing species but cannot escape its base origins. In 2075 space travel and exploitation is practically commonplace but, as we’ve conquered the void between Earth and the asteroid belt and prepare to exploit the outer planets, the once-pristine void around us has become clotted with our obsolete tech and casually discarded rubbish.

Even the most minuscule piece of junk or debris falling through hard vacuum is a high-speed, potentially deadly missile and to keep risk to a minimum, hardy teams of rugged individualists have to literally sweep the heavens free of our discarded crap.

The stories revolve around youthful trashman Hachimaki Hoshino whose greatest dream is to become a true deep-space astronaut and famous explorer like his famous – if disreputable – father. The boy has his future all mapped out: a similar career-path to dear old dad will lead to fame and wealth and then he can buy his own spaceship and be really free…

Sadly the incessantly dull toil of his deep night day-job is wearing away at the passionate, excitable Hachi who is becoming swiftly disenchanted with the whole dreary, disgusting drudgery aboard DS-12 – a standard sanitation/cargo ship fondly dubbed Toybox…

The first episode in this stunning second volume begins with ‘Running Man’ as the Toybox’s weary crew visit Moon Orbital Space Port and the obsessively training Hachimaki is approached by an unctuous business type looking for his infamous dad. Werner Locksmith is the head and chief designer of the Earth Development Community-sponsored manned mission to Jupiter and, unknown to the starry-eyed kid, had pegged Hachi’s father as the only man capable of piloting the innovative new vessel on the five year mission: one the boy would give anything to be on.

However the elder explorer doesn’t want to go and has actually absconded from the Private/Public sector project and is currently a fugitive…

The old rogue has had enough of space-faring: a fact he finds impossible to relate to his furious son when they meet. The old spacer intends to retire to Earth and make things right with the wife he’s abandoned…

Meanwhile Locksmith has been called away. Something has gone disastrously wrong with the Jupiter ship Von Braun…

Above Luna as Hachi argues with his dad, another crisis occurs as a devastating explosion rips through the station and everybody evacuates. In the safe chill of the void, Hachi and the crew see a phenomenal debris field emanating from the moon’s surface. The Von Braun’s experimental engines have failed and an entire lunar base has been evaporated…

Following the tragedy the ruthlessly cool Locksmith unswervingly starts to rebuild and the senior Hoshino breathes a sigh of relief. Hachi is undeterred. He resumes his training, knowing that when the Von Braun is ready to fly, he will be ready to join it…

Acknowledging their comrade’s impossible dream, stoic Russian Yuri Mihairokov and commander Fee Carmichael have inducted by a raw new recruit to the Toybox team and tasked Hachi with training her to be his eventual replacement. According to the ambitious lad, however, Ai ‘Tanabe’ is a hopeless case, fruitlessly wasting valuable time he could be using to train and study for his application to the Jupiter Mission. Suffering mightily from having to baby-sit the useless girl, he only discovers her suppressed inner fire after a 50-year old space coffin is recovered from the dark expanse and provokes a bitter dispute about love, passion and man’s place in the cold, lonely universe…

Hachi’s dream comes a giant leap closer to reality in ‘A Black Flower named Sakinohaka Part 1’ as he finally begins his official audition for the Von Braun. The boy has become an emotional void with nothing but his cold ambition driving him. He can’t even process the deadly and constant threat posed by increased sabotage activity from the terrorist SDL; a group determined to keep space free of Man’s toxic presence.

Despite the more than 20,000 applicants, Hoshino is beginning to distinguish himself when a series of bomb blasts rocks the controversial project. Narrowly escaping death, Hachi is visited by his old friends who are horrified by the obsessed spacer’s blasé attitude and apparent disregard for the pain and suffering of his rival candidates who were caught in the detonations. Is he truly so determined to get on the mission that all he sees are fewer competitors?

Only fellow applicant and new buddy Hakimu seems to understand that any sacrifice and personal misery are worth the prize…

Soon the testing is in its final stages and Werner Locksmith lectures the remaining candidates from the bridge of the almost completed Von Braun. Only nine of the desperate spacers will make this final cut but the big day is again delayed after Hachi confronts the insidious saboteur and fails to stop him…

The tale resumes six months later as the last twenty three candidates await the final call whilst in ‘A Black Flower named Sakinohaka Part 2’ Hachi’s still-fugitive father is targeted by SDL assassins and heads back to the son who has disowned him. His arrival coincides with young Tanabe’s visit to deliver the boy’s belongings from Toybox, leading to an embarrassing confusion as to her amatory status, but before things can be fully clarified the terrorists attack again, determined to ensure the death of the “only man who could pilot the Von Braun”…

Fleeing through the lowest levels of the Moon’s Oriental Basin Underground Tunnel City the trio are more of a danger to each other than their murderous pursuers and after another catastrophic explosion Hachi again confronts the traitor who sabotaged his last attempt to join the mission and almost commits an unpardonable act until gentle Tanabe talks him off the emotionally-charged metaphorical ledge…

‘Lost Souls’ sees the lad successfully in final training for the mission that has become his life when a lunar accident strands Hachi and new comrade Leonov on the unforgiving surface with only hours of oxygen and a 40 kilometre walk to the nearest relief station. It would have been impossible even if the co-pilot wasn’t wounded with a slowly-leaking suit.

By the time rescue arrived Hachi had reached the stage where he fought his saviours, frantic to prove that he truly needs no one’s help to achieve his goals…

This sublime saga concludes here with ‘СПАСИБО’ (or “Spasibo” which can be either “thank you” or “God save you”) as the recuperating Hachi returns to the family home in Japan, accompanied by his penitent father, and is visited by Leonov’s grateful mother. Although he doesn’t understand a word she says, the old lady still makes far more sense than his constantly warring family and, after another drunken fight with his dad, events come to tragic, galvanising crisis which at last crushes the walls around the traumatised young man’s head and heart…

Also included are working sketches, pin-ups, a bunch of four-panel sidebar humour strips ‘A Four Panel Comic’, ‘Namao-san (Presumably Male)’, ‘Eat? That Thing?’, ‘Drinking Hot Coffee through a Straw’ and prose biographies of revered and inspirational author Kenji Miyazawa and pioneer Cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyevitch Gagarin in ‘Conceptualising Space Travel’.

Suspenseful, funny, thrilling and utterly absorbing, these tales readily reinvigorate and reinvent the magical allure of the Wild Black Yonder for newer generations, and this authentic, hard-edged and wittily evocative epic is a treat no hard-headed dreamer with head firmly in the clouds can afford to miss…

This book is printed in the traditional Japanese right to left, back to front format.
© 2001 Makoto Yukimura. All rights reserved. English text © 2004 TOKYOPOP Inc.

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Johnny Hazard – The Gold of Thal


By Frank Robbins (Pacific Comics Publications)
No ISBN

Johnny Hazard was a newspaper strip created in the style and manner of Terry and the Pirates, but in many ways the steely-eyed hero most resembles – and indeed presages – Milton Caniff’s second magnum opus Steve Canyon.

Unbelievably, until 2011 this stunningly impressive and enthralling adventure strip was never comprehensively collected in graphic novels – at least in English – although selected highlights had appeared in nostalgia magazines such as Pioneer Comics and Dragon Lady Press Presents.

However, sporadic compendiums of full-colour Sunday pages have popped up over the years, such as this gloriously huge (340 x 245mm) landscape tabloid produced by re-translating a collected Italian edition back into English, courtesy of the Pacific Comic Club.

Frank Robbins was a brilliant all-around cartoonist whose unique artistic and lettering style lent itself equally to adventure, comedy and superhero tales, whilst his expansive raconteur’s gifts made him one of the best writers of three generations of comics.

He first came to fame in 1939 when he took over newspaper strip Scorchy Smith (from the astounding Noel Sickles), creating a Sunday page for the feature in 1940. Robbins was then offered the high-profile Secret Agent X-9 but instead created his own lantern jawed, steely-eyed man of action.

A tireless and prolific worker, even whilst producing a daily and Sunday Hazard (usually a separate storyline for each), Robbins freelanced as an illustrator for The Saturday Evening Post, Look, Life and a host of other mainstream magazines.

In the 1960s and 1970s he moved into comicbooks, becoming a key contributor to Batman, Batgirl, Detective Comics (where he created Man-Bat with Neal Adams) and The Flash, followed Michael Kaluta on The Shadow and contributed to humour mag Plop! as well as DC’s mystery anthologies. Moving to Marvel in the early 1970s, Robbins concentrated on drawing a variety of titles including Captain America, Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Morbius, Human Fly, Man from Atlantis, Power Man and The Invaders, which he co-created with Roy Thomas.

When Johnny Hazard launched on Monday June 5th 1944, its star was an aviator in the United States Army Air Corps who, when hostilities ceased, became for a while a freelance charter pilot and secret agent before settling into the bombastic life of a globe-girdling trouble-shooter, mystery-solver and modern day Knight Errant babe-magnet.

The strip ended in 1977: another victim of diminishing panel-sizes and the move towards simplified, thrill-free, family-friendly gag-a-day graphic fodder to wrap around small-ads.

With the release at long last of a dedicated collection of the black and white Daily strips, I thought I’d spotlight a few of those fabulous landscape tomes which kept the Amazing Aviator alive in fans’ hearts in the years since it ceased publication.

In a previous review remarkably similar to this one, we saw the Rangoon-based World-Wide Airline head-honcho handle a madly muddled movie crew in Mammoth Marches On, battle a Japanese war-criminal with atomic aspirations in ‘The Hunted’ and bring to book a gang of highly sophisticated plane-wrecking ‘Scavengers’ in the jungles between Vietnam and Cambodia, before heading off on his next incredible adventure which barely began before that particular collection concluded. This particular tome re-presents sequences which first appeared in American Sunday Supplements between April 19th 1953 and July 4th 1954, and depict a time of wild globetrotting exploits and increasingly exhilarating fantasy frolics…

‘Ceiling Zero-Minus’ found Johnny and trusty pals Don and Cutout hired to take a new type of helicopter down into the deepest, widest hole on Earth in search of missing miners, and this sensational storyline continues with an astounding discovery as their vertical vehicle is trapped in a net nine thousand feet below the surface…

The unbelievable follow-up is even more amazing as the trio are taken prisoner by a Herculean giant and introduced to a fantastic subterranean civilisation built over eons by cavemen fleeing Earth’s last Ice Age.

Moreover the ambitious super-scientific overlords of the sub-city state of Namron are in the final stages of a complex and long-planned invasion of the surface world. They already have spies and fifth columnists placed in the most unsuspected places…

With the upper lands exhausted by recent wars and divided by ideology the crucial day is fast approaching, especially as wicked dictator Nallor has captured the beautiful Princess Alba…

It transpires that the rival city of Justus has long held the subterranean tyrant’s insane ambitions in check, but with their ruler’s daughter now a hostage Nallor feels confidant enough to start his campaign, but hasn’t reckoned on the capable Hazard’s ability to make trouble. Soon the escaped surface-men are dashing the rescued Alba back to Justus through the underworld with all the unimaginably resources of the invaders at their heels, but they have not reckoned on the fact that one of them is a Namronian double-agent…

Fantastic and eerily spectacular, the fantasy epic ends with the heroes triumphant and Upper Earth saved, so seven days later it was back to rip-roaring adventure in a traditional vein with ‘Deadly Game!’ (August 30th 1953-January 24th 1954) as Johnny is chartered to ferry a chess master to a bizarre competition in the heart of the Burmese jungle. Little do the plucky pilot or Señor Professor Eduardo Estaban realise just how seriously enigmatic plantation owner Mr. Basil takes his games…

The first hint comes when the tea-farmer’s lovely young wife starts passing terrified notes, but the clincher is when Johnny discovers the bodies of previous players in the Room of Death…

Things come to a head when the pilot then finds out what Basil is really cultivating in his vast, isolated fields and leads to a deadly duel of wits …and bombs and bullets…

The furious finale finds Hazard, Estaban and Valerie Basil fleeing a scene of deadly devastation on the packet boat of corpulent rogue Captain Shark as ‘Monkey See…Monkey Do!’ (running from January 31st to May 9th 1954) draws the stunned survivors into an ancient feud. Whilst torturously returning to civilisation along the sluggishIrrawaddy, Hazard finds a stuffed monkey in the captain’s cabin – one bedecked with thousands of dollars worth of ancient jewellery…

Years ago Shark and his thieving colleague Peter “Three-Eyes” Lynch had fought over a treasure map which led to a lost city deep in the jungle. Ever since Three-Eyes went overboard with half the map and a bullet-hole in him, Shark has travelled the river as an itinerant courier searching in vain for his prize, but now the battle at Basil’s plantation has uncovered a hidden tributary and the unlucky passengers have no choice but to go along with the obsessed Captain…

Things take a terrifying turn when the boat is invaded by gun-toting monkeys who take them all captive and bring the vessel to that much-sought lost city…

Three-Eyes didn’t die that night. Instead he drifted to the ancient ruin and spent long months training the anthropoids to do his bidding. All this time he’s been waiting for somebody to find the desolated ruins and provide him with a means of transporting back to civilisation the tons of gold and gems he’s been impatiently sitting on…

Things are tense enough with the wanderers as simple captives of the crazy monkey- man, but when Three-Eyes realises just how long it’s been since he touched a human woman, the situation escalates…

Although the chivalrous pilot successfully defends Valerie, they and Estaban can only watch in horror as Shark and Lynch finally take their long-deferred dispute to its ultimate, foregone conclusion…

This volume – like its predecessor – then carries on into the next saga and ends on a tantalising cliffhanger as, after dragging his charges back to Rangoon and safety, Hazard is then hired by a climber who claims to have been the first person to actually scale Mount Everest. Surprisingly, Virgil Dale isn’t too fussed about not getting the credit for such an incredible achievement: he’s since hooked up with returning villainess/entrepreneur Baroness Flame who wants to fund an expedition to the High Himalayas and capture the beast he discovered there – ‘The Abominable Snowman!’

To be continued…

These exotic action-romances perfectly captured the mood and magic of a distant but so incredibly familiar time; with cool heroes, hot dames and exceedingly intemperate bad-guys encountering exotic locales and stunning scenarios, all peppered with blistering tension, slyly mature humour and vivid, visceral excitement.

Johnny Hazard is a brilliant two-fisted thriller-strip and even if you can’t easily locate these fantastic full-colour chronicles, at least the prospect of an eventual new Sunday strip collection is a little closer at last…
© 1953-1954 King Features Syndicate. © 1980 Pacific C.C.

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The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm


By Norman Hunter, illustrated by W. Heath Robinson (Puffin/Red Fox and others)
ISBNs: PSS33 (1969 Puffin edition)             978-1-86230-736-0 (Red Fox 2008)

Although I’m pushing a number of comic-based kids books this week I’d be utterly remiss if I didn’t also include at least one example of the venerably traditional illustrated novel which used to be the happily inescapable staple of bedtime for generations. This particular example is particularly memorable, not simply because it’s a timeless masterpiece of purely English wit and surreal invention, but also because most editions are blessed with a wealth of stunning pictures by an absolute master of absurdist cartooning and wry, dry wit.

Norman George Lorimer Hunter was born on November 23rd, 1899in Sydenham; a decade after that part of Kentbecame part of the ever-expanding Countyof London. He started work as an advertising copywriter and moved into book writing soon after with Simplified Conjuring for All: a collection of new tricks needing no special skill or apparatus for their performance with suitable patter, Advertising Through the Press: a guide to press publicity and New and Easy Magic: a further series of novel magical experiments needing no special skill or apparatus for their performance with suitable patter published between 1923 and 1925.

He was working as a stage magician in Bournemouthduring the early 1930s when he first began concocting the genially explosive exploits of the absolute archetypical absent-minded boffin for radio broadcasts. The tales were read by the inimitable Ajax – to whom the first volume is dedicated – as part of the BBC Home Service’s Children’s Hour.

In 1933 The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm was published in hardback with 76 enthrallingly intricate illustrations by W. Heath Robinson to great success, prompting the sequel Professor Branestawm’s Treasure Hunt (illustrated by James Arnold & George Worsley Adamson) four years later.

During WWII Hunter moved back to Londonand in 1949 emigrated to South Africawhere he worked outside the fiction biz until his retirement. He returned to Britainin 1970, following the release of Thames Television’s Professor Branestawm TV series which adapted many of the short stories from the original books in the summer of 1969.

Following the show Hunter resumed writing: another 11 Branestawn tomes between 1970-1983, plus a selection of supplemental books including Professor Branestawm’s Dictionary (1973), …Compendium of Conundrums, Riddles, Puzzles, Brain Twiddlers and Dotty Descriptions (1975), …Do-it-yourself Handbook (1976) and many magic-related volumes.

Norman Hunter died in 1995.

William Heath Robinson was born on May 31st 1872 into something of an artistic dynasty. His father Thomas was chief staff artist for Penny Illustrated Paper. His older brothers Thomas and Charles were also illustrators of note.

After schooling William tried unsuccessfully to become a watercolour landscape-artist before returning to the family trade and in 1902 produced the fairy story ‘Uncle Lubin’ before contributing regularly to The Tatler, Bystander, Sketch, Strand and London Opinion. During this period he developed the humorous whimsy and penchant for eccentric, archaic-looking mechanical devices that made him a household name.

During the Great War he uniquely avoided the Jingoistic stance and fervour of his fellow artists, preferring instead to satirise the absurdity of conflict itself with volumes of cartoons such as The Saintly Hun. Then, after a 20-year career of phenomenal success and creativity in cartooning, illustration and particularly advertising, he found himself forced to do it again in World War Two.

He died on13th September 1944.

Perhaps inspired by the Branestawm commission, Heath Robinson’s 1934 collection Absurdities hilariously describes the frail resilience of the human condition in the Machine Age and particularly how the English deal with it all. They are also some of his funniest strips and panels. Much too little of his charming and detailed illustrative wit is in print today, a situation that cries out for Arts Council Funding or Lottery money, perhaps more than any other injustice in the sadly neglected field of cartooning and Popular Arts.

The first inspirational Professor Branestawm storybook introduces the dotty, big-domed, scatterbrained savant as a ramshackle cove with five pairs of spectacles – which he generally wears all at once – and his clothes held together with safety pins …probably because the many explosions he creates always blow his buttons off.

The wise buffoon spends most of his days thinking high thoughts and devising odd devices in his “Inventory” whilst his mundane requirements are taken care of by dotty, devoted, frequently frightened or flustered housekeeper Mrs. Flittersnoop. Branestawm’s best chum is the gruff Colonel Dedshott of the Catapult Cavaliers, although said old soldier seldom knows what the scientist is talking about…

The over-educated inspirationalist and his motley crew first appeared in ‘The Professor Invents a Machine’ which saw the debut of an arcane device that moved so quickly that Branestawm and Dedshott were carried a week into the past and accidentally undid a revolution in Squiglatania – and ended up upsetting everybody on both sides of the argument.

In ‘The Wild Waste-Paper’ Mrs. Flittersnoop’s incessant tidying up caused a spill of the Professor’s new Elixir of Vitality and the consequent enlargement and animation of a basket full of furiously angry bills, clingy postcards and discarded envelopes, whilst in

‘The Professor Borrows a Book’ the absent-minded mentor mislaid a reference tome and had to borrow another from the local library.

A house full of books is the worst place to lose one, and when the second one went walkies Branestawm had to borrow a third or pay the fine on the second. By the time he’d finished the Professor had checked out fourteen copies and was killing himself covertly transporting it from library to library…

When his stuff-stuffed house was raided by ‘Burglars!’ the shocked and horrified thinker was driven to concoct the ultimate security system. It was the perfect device to defend an Englishman’s Castle – unless he was the type who regularly forgot his keys and that he had installed an anti-burglar machine…

When he lost a day because he hadn’t noticed his chronometer had stopped, the Professor invented a new sort of timepiece that never needed winding. Even the local horologist wanted one.

Sadly the meandering mentalist had forgotten to add a what-not to stop them striking more than twelve and as the beastly things inexorably added one peal every hour soon there were more dings than could fit in any fifty-nine minutes. ‘The Screaming Clocks’ quickly became most unwelcome and eventually an actually menace to life and limb…

The Professor often thought so hard that he ceased all motion. Whilst visiting ‘The Fair at Pagwell Green’ Mrs. Flittersnoop and Colonel Dedshott mistook a waxwork of the famously brilliant bumbler for the real thing and brought “him” home to finish his pondering in private. Sadly the carnival waxworks owner alternatively believed he had a wax statue that had learned to talk…

‘The Professor Sends an Invitation’ saw the savant ask Dedshott to tea but forget to include the laboriously scripted card. By means most arcane and convoluted, the doughty old warrior received an ink-smudged blotter in an addressed envelope and mobilised to solve a baffling cipher. Of course his first port-of-call had to be his clever scientific friend – who had subsequently forgotten all about upcoming culinary events…

‘The Professor Studies Spring Cleaning’ found Branestawm applying his prodigious intellect and inventive acumen to the seasonal tradition that so vexed Mrs. Flittersnoop before inevitably finding a way to make things worse. He thus constructed a house-engine that emptied and cleaned itself. Of course it couldn’t really tell the difference between sofa, couch cupboard or housekeeper…

‘The Too-Many Professors’ appeared when the affable artificer invented a solution which brought pictures to life. Flittersnoop was guardedly impressed when illustrations of apples and chocolates became edibly real but utterly aghast when a 3-dimensional cat and elephant began crashing about in the parlour.

So it was pretty inevitable that the foul-smelling concoction would be spilled all over the photograph albums…

In a case of creativity feeding on itself, ‘The Professor Does a Broadcast’ relates how the brilliant old duffer was asked to give a lecture on the Wireless (no, not about radio, but for it…). Unaccustomed as he was to public speaking, the tongue-tied boffin had Dedshott rehearse and drill him until he could recite the whole speech in eleven minutes. Of course the scheduled programme was supposed to last half an hour…

A grand Fancy Dress Ball resulted in two eccentric pillars of Pagwell Society wittily masquerading as each other. Naturally ‘Colonel Branestawm and Professor Dedshott’ were a great success but when the Countess of Pagwell‘s pearls were purloined whilst the old duffers changed back to their regular attire nobody noticed the difference or believed them…

‘The Professor Moves House’ found the inventor forced to rent larger premises because he had filled up the old one with his contraptions. However Branestawm’s attempts to rationalise the Moving Men’s work patterns proved that even he didn’t know everything. At least the disastrous ‘Pancake Day at Great Pagwell’ rescued his reputation when his magnificent automatic Pancake-Making Machine furiously fed a multitude of friends and civic dignitaries. The Mayor liked it so much he purchased it to lay all the municipality’s pavements…

This gloriously enchanting initial outing ends with ‘Professor Branestawm’s Holiday’ as the old brain-bonce finally acquiesced to his housekeeper’s urgent urgings and went for a vacation to the seaside. Keen on swotting up on all things jellyfish the savant set off but forgot to check in at his boarding house, prompting a desperate search by Dedshott, Flittersnoop and the authorities.

Things were further complicated by a Pierrot Show which boasted the best Professor Branestawn impersonator inBritain: so good in fact that even the delinquent dodderer’s best friends could not tell the difference.

With the performer locked up in a sanatorium claiming he wasn’t a Professor, it was a lucky thing the one-and-only scatty scholar was unable to discern the difference between a lecture hall and a seaside show-tent…

As I’ve already mentioned, these astonishingly accessible yarns were originally written for radio and thus abound with rhythmic cadences and onomatopoeic sound effects that just scream to be enjoyed out loud. This eternally fresh children’s classic, augmented by 76 of Heath-Robinson’s most memorable character caricatures and insane implements, offer some of the earliest and most enduring example of spiffing techno-babble and fabulous faux-physics – not to mention impressive iterations of the divine Pathetic Fallacy in all its outrageous glory – and no child should have to grow up without visiting and revisiting the immortal, improbable Pagwell Pioneer.

In 2008 a 75th Anniversary edition of The Incredible Adventures of Professor Branestawm was released by Red Fox but you’re just a likely to find this uproarious ubiquitous marvel in libraries, second-hand shops or even jumble sales – so by all means do…
© 1933 Norman Hunter. All rights reserved.

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Doctor Who Graphic Novels volume 14: The Child of Time


By Jonathan Morris, Mike Collins, David A. Roach, Roger Langridge, Martin Geraghty, Dan McDaid, Rob Davis, Geraint Ford, Adrian Salmon, & James Offredi (Panini Books)
ISBN: 978-1-84653-460-7

Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: scintillating, superior sci fi for the bigger kids cluttering up the house and waiting for the TV Specials to start … 8/10

Doctor Who launched on television in the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ on November 23rd 1963. Less than a year later, his decades-long run in TV Comic began with issue #674 and the premier instalment of ‘The Klepton Parasites’. On 11th October 1979 (although adhering to the US off-sale cover-dating system so it says 17th) Marvel’s UK subsidiary launched Doctor Who Weekly, which became a monthly magazine in September 1980 (#44) and has been with us under various names ever since.

All of which only goes to prove that the Time Lord is a comic hero with an impressive pedigree…

Panini is in the ongoing process of collecting every strip from its archive in a uniform series of over-sized graphic albums, each concentrating on a particular incarnation of the deathless wanderer. This particular one gathers stories short and long which, taken together comprise a two-year extended epic. From Doctor Who Magazine (or DWM) #421-441 (originally published between 2010-2011), this run features the strip debut of the Matt Smith incarnation of the far-flung, far-out Time Lord as well as his foremost companion Amy Pond.

None of which is relevant if all you want is a darn good read. All the creators involved have managed the ultimate task of any comics-creator – to produce engaging, thrilling, fun stories which can be equally enjoyed by the merest beginner and the most slavishly dedicated – and opinionated – fans imaginable.

With all tales written by Jonathan Morris (plus, according to the author, liberal input from editors Scott Gray & Tom Spilsbury), coloured by James Offredi and lettered by Roger Langridge, the drama kicks off in ‘Supernature’ (illustrated by Mike Collins & David A. Roach, from DWM #421-423, May-July 2010).

Arriving on a jungle paradise world The Doctor and Amy quickly discover Earthling colonists in the midst of a terrifying plague…

The humans – all convicts press-ganged and abandoned to turn the planet into a suitable home – are being transformed into uncanny mutant beasts, and even the Time Lord and his new companion are monsterised before the crisis is solved. However when they depart they take part of the problem with them…

A rare but very welcome art job for regular letterer Langridge results in a bizarre and wonderful spoof on ‘Planet Bollywood!’ when warring factions of an ancient empire – and a romantic leading man – all struggle to possess a sexy humanoid device which compels listeners to break out in song and dance routines, after which a trip to Tokyo found fresh horror in the metamorphosis of innocent – if educationally lacking – children into a deadly fifth column…

‘The Golden Ones’ (#425-428, by Martin Geraghty & Roach) is a grand old-fashioned blockbuster invasion saga with a huge body-count, valiant armed resistance by dedicated UNIT soldiers, a classic villain’s return, a brilliant scientific solution and a slew of subtle clues to the greater saga unfolding. Just who is that strange little girl who keeps popping up everywhen?

From #429 comes the literary fantasy-homage ‘The Professor, the Queen and the Bookshop’ (Rob Davis & Geraint Ford) wherein our heroes meet a reclusive writer and evacuee children Amy – and hubby-to-be Rory – encounter a strange man in an infinite shop which can travel anywhere…

It’s back to Paris in 1858 for Dan McDaid’s ‘The Screams of Death’ as aspiring but hopeless singer Cosette is taken under the wing of impresario Monsieur Valdemar and develops a voice that could shake the Opera House to its foundations. Of course, the Svengali-like Fugitive from the Future had far grander plans for his many captive songbirds until Mam’selle Pond and M’sieu le Docteur turned up to foil a mad scheme to rewrite history…

The over-arching epic takes a big step forward in #432’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’ (featuring a welcome full-art outing for the splendid David Roach) as the Tardis turns up in an old people’s home staffed by robots, haunted by children and plagued by a vanishing roster of residents, whilst Adrian Salmon gets his freak on in the trippy terror-tale ‘Forever Dreaming’ (#433-434) as Amy is apparently trapped in a 1960’s seaside town with a dark secret, a phantom octopus and a host of psychedelic icons who really should be dead…

The saga swings into full acceleration with ‘Apotheosis’ (DWM #435-437 and limned by McDaid) as the Doctor and Amy land aboard a derelict space station and walk into the closing act of a galaxy-spanning war between humanity and their scheduled replacements: the awesome autonomous androids of Galatea.

Aboard the station, a cadre of warrior Space Nuns are seeking an ultimate weapon to tip the scales of the conflict, but with lethal sanitation robots everywhere and rogue time-distortion fields making each step a potential death-march, the hunt is hard-going. With everybody – even the Time Lord – hyper-aging at vastly different rates, when the Tardis then mutates into something impossible, the stage is set for a spectacular threat to all of creation to be born…

Of course, first the Machiavellian, monstrously manipulative and atrociously amoral creature calling herself Chiyoko must carry out a number of crucial appointments in Eternity to ensure the existence and consolidate the celestial dominance of ‘The Child of Time’ (with art from Geraghty & Roach from (DWM #438-441 August -November 2011).

Two years’ worth of cleverly-concocted mystery and imagination are then wrapped up in a staggering, creatively-anachronistic display of temporal hocus-pocus by scripter Morris as The Doctor, Amy and allies Alan Turing and the Bronte Sisters ward off the unmaking of time, the end of humanity and eradication of all life in the universe before the tragic finale and a happy ever after of sorts…

Dedicated fans can also enjoy a treasure-trove of background information in the 25-page  text Commentary section at the back, comprising chapter-by-chapter background, history and insights from the author and each of the illustrators, supplemented by happy horde of sketches, roughs, designs, production art and even excised material from all concerned.

We’ve all have our private joys and hidden passions. Sometimes they overlap and magic is made. This is another superb set of supremely satisfying comic strips, starring an absolute Pillar of the British Fantasy pantheon.

If you’re a fan of only one, The Child of Time should certainly spark your hunger for the other. This is a fabulous book for casual readers, a fine shelf addition for devotees of the show, the ideal opportunity to cross-promote our particular art-form and the perfect present for the Telly Addict haunting your house…

All Doctor Who material © BBCtv. Doctor Who logo © BBC 2012. Tardis image © BBC 1963. Doctor Who, Tardis and all logos are trade marks of the British Broadcasting Corporation and are used under licence by BBC Worldwide. Published 2012 by Panini Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.