Category: Science Fiction

Posted on

It Came!


By Dan Boultwood, Esq. (Titan Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-78276-005-4 (HB)

Once upon a time “retro” only meant rockets, with all those thrilling chilling connotations of clunky spaceships, cardboard robots and men in Baco-foil suits shambling about and terrifying avid children who had stayed up late to watch B-movie sci-fi yarns on black-&-white TV sets.

Jeepers, I miss those days, and so, apparently, does multi-talented, forward-thinking nostalgeologist Dan Boultwood.

In 2013, his 4-issue miniseries offered a tantalising tribute to the fantastic fantasy movies which fuelled the imaginations of British Baby-Boomers: simultaneously recapturing the wide-eyed wonder of the period whilst adding layers of archly post-modern humour to the mix…

This stirring monochrome graphic-novelisation of a faux-classic effort from the rightly almost-forgotten Pinetree Studios outfit allows modern film fans to experience (or revisit) the quirky delights which wowed their grandparents – and all from the comfort of their own safely locked-down homes – or even whilst out riding (masked and gloved) in a open-topped omnibus…

Packed to bursting with and supplemented by oodles of outrageous, hilarious, mood-setting ads for everything from Smoke & Choke’um Cigarettes to Johnny Foreigner Engine Oil, the story is a loving but irreverent paean of praise not only to those inspirational filmic marvels but also to the small repertory of actors and producers who made the late 1950s and early 1960s such a cornucopia of movie madness.

Like all such matinee marvels, the main feature here is preceded by a short trailer (for The Lost Valley of the Lost) which serves to introduce our cast, specifically He-Man Lead Dick Claymore as the sexist, pipe-chewing, tweed draped boffin Dr. Boy Brett and strident starlet Fanny Flaunders as his long-suffering, infinitely patient, glamorous-whilst-screaming assistant/secretary Doris Night.

The vintage supporting cast includes Bertrum Cumberbund, Spencer Lacey and Joan Fetlock, stalwart Pinetree thespians all…

It’s 1958 and in a beautiful bit of rural, ill-educated, unwoke England a colossal robot rampages…

Two days later Dr. Brett from Space University is treating working class ingénue Doris to a ride in his Morris Minor. He decides they should stop for a fortifying Ploughman’s Lunch in a strangely quiet and quaint village, blithely unaware that the reason it’s so still is because the aforementioned alien automaton has depopulated the shire…

Its subsequent surprise attempt to trap the tourists founders only when it stumbles into a cloying web of obfuscating, celebratory bunting…

After their spectacular close call the harried humans reach the next village over, but despite the boffin’s Old Boy Network connections, it’s the Devil’s own job to get the Ministry to mobilise the Military.

Nevertheless, Boy persists and soon a squad of veterans arrive to take control of the situation (a superb pastiche of the venerable icons of the “Carry-On” film franchise), only to vanish as the rapacious robot strikes again…

Undaunted, Boy drags Doris into more trouble and soon they find themselves aboard a vast Flying Saucer, uncovering the nature of the invaders’ appalling assault. The creepy, apparently unstoppable horrors are imprisoning salt-of-the-earth British citizens and somehow extracting their Stiff Upper Lips…

Following a necessary Intermission – for the purchase and consumption of gin and fags – the cartoon/celluloid calamity continues as our hero and the girl escape and head for London to warn the authorities, but not before accidentally dropping a handy but unlucky army division on exercises right in the UFO’s marauding sights.

Dr. Brett arrives barely ahead of the indestructible, unbeatable Saucer and, as the World’s Smoggiest Capital burns and founders, he is compelled to stop running and turn his mighty, college-honed intellect to the task of destroying the threat to civilisation…

This collection is also augmented by the original full-colour covers, hysterical background “information pages” on and intimate photos of stars Claymore and Flaunders, blueprints and design sketches for the alien Grurk and Flying Saucer, a selection from the infamous It Came! Cigarette Cards and colour posters for other Pinetree Studio releases such as ‘My Reptilian Bride!’, ‘Rocket Into Space!’, ‘The Lost Valley of the Lost’ and ‘Myopic Moon Men from the Moon’…

More revelations are forthcoming in the ‘Metropolitan Police Incident Report on Mr. Claymore’s “eccentric” Drinking Habits’, and Director Boultwood’s photo-feature exposing his Special Effects magic in animating the Saucer for celluloid.

It Came! is a brilliant and sublime masterpiece of loving parody, perfectly executed and astoundingly effective. It is also the funniest – both visually and verbally – book I’ve read in years, blending slapstick with satire, outrageous ideas with infamous characterisations, and spit-taking puns, single entendres and innuendoes that would do Sid James, Charles Hawtrey or Kenneth Williams proud.

Miss it at your peril, Chaps (and Ladies too…).
It Came! ™ and © 2014 Dan Boultwood.

Posted on

You Shall Die by Your Own Evil Creation!: More Comics by Fletcher Hanks


By Fletcher Hanks, edited by Paul Karasik (Fantagraphics Books)
ISBN: 978-1-606699-160-2 (TPB)

Although he was a pioneering auteur and prolific creator, the work of troubled artisan Fletcher Hanks (December 1st 1889 – January 22nd 1976) was all-but lost to posterity for decades following the Darwinian dawn of the American comic book. Happily, he was rediscovered relatively recently by comics’ intelligentsia in such magazines as Raw!

Hank’s unique visual style and frankly histrionic manner of storytelling resulted in only 51 complete stories created over less than three years (1939-1941) – but those were during the make-or-break, crucially formative times that would shape the industry for decades to come.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Hanks was an artist plagued by a dependence on alcohol and a tendency to violence. Surviving on odd jobs and as a mural painter, he abandoned his wife and four children in 1930 and disappeared until the incredible commercial drive to fill comic book pages saw him resurface in 1939 as part of the Jerry Iger/Will Eisner production “Shop”. Here he generated whole stories (script, art, lettering and probably even colour-guides) for some of the most successful publishers of the Golden Age. All were fast-paced, action-packed, relentless blood-&-thunder thrillers, underpinned by what might well be hallucinogenic delirium…

Hanks is now globally prominent in art circles and regarded as a key Outsider Artist – defined by critic Roger Cardinal as an English-language equivalent to the French movement Art Brut or Raw/Rough Art: works created outside the boundaries of official culture. Jean Dubuffet connected the phenomenon especially and specifically to the paintings and drawings of insane asylum inmates but Cardinal extended the definition to include Naïve art, some Primitivism and sustained bodies of work by creators working at all fringes of the mainstream.

In his woefully short career, the impact of those 51 stories were further reduced since he only worked in a few returning characters. This book follows on from and concludes the complete works compilation begun in editor Karasik’s I Shall Destroy all the Civilized Planets! (which I simply must track down and review too).

Presented in chronological order, this book contains seven Space Smith adventures – ‘Captured by Skomah!’ (Fantastic#1, December 1939), ‘The Martian Ogres!’ (Fantastic #2, January 1940), ‘The Leopard Women of Venus’ (#3, February), ‘The Thinker’ (#4, March), ‘The Hoppers’ (#5, April), ‘The Vacuumites’ (#6, May) and ‘Planet Bloodu’ (#8, July): a single tale of Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle from Jungle Comics #1 (‘The Slave Raiders’, January 1940) plus a batch of red-blooded lumberjack yarns starring Big Red McLane: ‘King of the North Woods’, ‘The Timber Thieves’, ‘The Lumber Hijackers’, ‘The Sinister Stranger’, ‘The Paper Racketeers’, ‘Sledge Sloan Gang’, ‘The Monk’s War Rockets’ and ‘Searching for Sally Breen’ from the monthly Fight  Comics (#1, January 1940, and #3 through 9).

The incomparable Stardust the Super-Wizard (whose slick, sleek costume surely influenced Britain’s Mick Anglo when he redesigned Captain Marvel into All-English Marvel Man in 1954!) is stirringly represented by ‘Rip the Blood’(Fantastic #2 January 1940), ‘The Mad Giant’ (#4), ‘The Emerald Men of Asperus’ (#8) ‘The Super Fiend’ (#10), ‘Kaos and the Vultures’ (#12), ‘The Sixth Columnists’ (#14) and ‘The World Invaders’ (Fantastic #15, February 1941).

No violent genre was beyond Hanks and prototype sword-wielding barbarian hero Tiger Hart rousingly romped through the jungles of Saturn in ‘The Dashing, Slashing Adventure of the Great Solinoor Diamond’ in Planet Comics #2 (February 1940).

From early 1940, Daring Mystery #4 and #5 supply ‘Mars Attacks’ and ‘Planet of Black-Light’, two exploits of brawny, clean-limbed Whirlwind Carter of the Interplanetary Secret Service, whilst Yank Wilson, Super Spy Q-4 performed much the same role for the contemporary USA in ‘The Saboteurs’ from Fantastic #6 (May 1940).

For me the biggest, most enjoyable revelation is the captivating batch of uncanny tales featuring the frankly indescribable Fantomah. The “Mystery Woman of the Jungle” – a blend of witch, goddess and reanimated corpse – used startling magic to monitor and defend the green places of the world against all manner of threats from poachers to mad scientists and aliens.

Her beguiling feats open with ‘The Elephants Graveyard’ (Jungle Comics #2, February 1940) and just get wilder and wilder, continuing with ‘The Super-Gorillas’ (#4), ‘Mundoor and the Giant Reptiles’ (#5), ‘Phantom of the Tree-Tops’(#6), ‘The Temple in the Mud Pit’ (#8), ‘The Scarlet Shadow’ (#11), ‘The New Blitzers’ (#12) and ‘The Tiger-Women of Wildmoon Mountain’ before ominously concluding with ‘The Revenge of Zomax’ from February 1941’s Jungle #14.

These stunningly surreal and forceful stories created under the pseudonyms Barclay Flagg, Hank Christy, Henry and Chris Fletcher, Charles Netcher, C.C. Starr and Carlson Merrick are a window into a different, bolder, proudly unconventional era and the troubled mind of a true creative force. Seen in conjunction with Karasik’s insightful introduction and the many early sketches and illustrations from before that too-brief foray into comics, these pages present an intimate glimpse of a fascinating man at a crossroads he was clearly able to shape but never grasp.

This is a magical book for both fans of classical comics and the cutting edge of modern art: and just in case you were wondering, the stories are weird but read wonderfully.

It Must Be Yours!!!

All stories are public domain but the specific restored images and design are © 2009 Fantagraphics Books.

Posted on

Velveteen & Mandala


By Jiro Matsumoto (Vertical)
ISBN: 978-1-935654-30-8 (Tankōbon PB)

Things have been a bit too much sweetness and light around here lately. Here’s a change of pace and taste then then needs a bit of an advisory warning. This book revels in gratuitous violence, barely-closeted misogyny and sexualised imagery. So why, then, is it so very good?

Civilisation has radically changed. What we knew is no longer right or true, but disturbing remnants remain to baffle and terrify, as High School girl Velveteen and her decidedly off-key classmate and companion/enemy Mandala eke out an extreme existence on the banks of a river in post-Zombie-Apocalypse Tokyo.

Here (with straight-faced nods to Tank Girl), using an abandoned battle-wagon as their crash-pad, the girls while away the days and nights casually slaughtering roaming hordes of zombies – at least whenever they can stop squabbling with each other…

From the very outset of this grim, sexy, gratuitous splatter-punk horror-show there is something decidedly “off” going on: a gory mystery beyond the usual “how did the world end this time?”

On the surface, Velveteen & Mandala (Becchin To Mandara in its original 14-chapter run between 2007-2009 in the periodical Manga Erotics F) is a monster-killing yarn which owes plenty to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but there’s more than meets the eye or ballistic charge happening here.

We begin at ‘The Riverside’ with the pair awaking from dreams to realise and remember the hell they now inhabit. Cunning catch-up concluded, ‘Smoke on the Riverside’ then reveals a few of the nastier ground-rules of their current lifestyle, and especially Velveteen’s propensity for arson and appetite for destruction…

‘Sukiyaki’ finds the girls on edge as food becomes an issue, whilst the introduction of ‘The Super’ who monitors their rate of zombie dispatch leads to more information (but not necessarily any answers) in this enigmatic world, after which ‘The Cellar’ amps up the uncertainty as Velveteen steals into her new boss’s ghastly man-cave inner sanctum…

In a medium where extreme violence is commonplace, Matsumoto increasingly uses unglamourised nudity and brusque vulgarity to unsettle and shock the reader, but the flashback events of … ‘School Arcade, Underground Shelter’ – if true and not delusion – indicate that a society this debased might not be worth saving from the undead…

In ‘Omen’ and ‘Good Omen (Whisper)’ the obfuscating mysteries begins to clear as B52 bombers dumps thousands more corpses by the Riverside, adding to the “to do” roster of walking dead the girls must deal with once darkness falls…

Throughout the story Matsumoto liberally injects cool artefacts of fashion, genre and pop-culture seemingly at random, but as the oppressive horrors get ever closer to ending our heroines in ‘Genocide’ and ‘Deep in the Dark’, a certain sense can be imagined, so that once the Super is removed and Velveteen promoted to his position in ‘Parting’, the drama spirals into a hallucinogenic – possibly untrustworthy – climax for ‘Mandala’s Big Farewell Party’ and ‘Nirvana’ before the further revelations of ‘Flight’…

Deliberately misleading and untrustworthy – and strictly aimed at over-18s – this dark, nasty, scatologically excessive tale graphically celebrates the differences between grotesque, flesh-eating dead-things and the constantly biologically mis-functioning Still-Living (although the zombie “Deadizens” are still capable of cognition, speech and rape…); all wrapped up in the culturally acceptable and traditional manner of one blowing the stuffings out of the other…

Confirmed confrontationalist Jiro Matsumoto (Uncivilized Planet, Avant-Pop Mars, A Revolutionist in the Afternoon, Tropical Citron) is probably best known for dystopian speculative sci-fi revenge thriller Freesia, but here his controversial yet sublime narrative gifts are turned to a much more psychologically complex – almost meta-fictional – layering of meaning upon revelation upon contention, indicating that if you have a strong enough stomach the very best is still to come…

First seen in English as a monochrome paperback in 2011, this stand-alone saga will be available in digital formats later this year.
© 2009 Jiro Matsumoto. All right reserved. Translation © 2011 Vertical, Inc.

Posted on

The Silent Invasion: Abductions


By Michael Cherkas & Larry Hancock, with Paul McCusker (NBM)
ISBN: 978-1-68112-255-7 (TPB)

During the vast expansion of opportunity and outpouring of innovation that graced comics during the 1980s, much of the “brain-rotting trash” or “silly kid’s stuff” stigma which had plagued the medium was finally dispelled. America started catching up to the rest of the world; acknowledging sequential narrative as an actual Capital “A” Art Form, and their doors opened wide open for foreigners to make a few waves too…

One of the most critically acclaimed and indescribably intoxicating features of the period came from semi-Canadian outfit Renegade Press which set up shop in the USA and began publishing at the very start of the black & white comics bubble in 1984. They quickly established a reputation for excellence, with a strong line of creator-based properties and some genuinely remarkable series such as Ms. Tree, Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire, Flaming Carrot,Normalman, and the compulsively backwards-looking Cold War/UFO/paranoia-driven delight seen here: The Silent Invasion.

That last was a stunningly stylish conspiracy saga, bolting 1950s domestic terrors (invasion by Reds; invasion by aliens; invasion by new ideas…) onto Film Noir chic and employing 20-20 hindsight to produce a phenomenally fresh and enticing delight for the strangely similar Reagan era. From here and now, it’s never seemed more distressingly likely that politics, if not all history, is cursed to repeat certain cycles and strategies…

The series was eventually collected as four superbly oversized monochrome tomes (a whopping 298 x 2058 mm), re-presenting the lead story from the first dozen issues of The Silent Invasion wherein inspired co-creators Michael Cherkas & Larry Hancock concocted a delightful confection combining all the coolest genre elements of classic cult sci-fi, horror, spy, conspiracy theory, crime, romance and even comedy yarns…

Now, after far too long a wait – and with America once again enduring internecine struggle amongst the citizenry, corruption (but no collusion!!), cover-ups at every level of government and the press under attack from the people and traditions it seeks to inform and safeguard – the series has been remastered, marginally revised and re-released in a more manageable paperback size (or fully adjustable eBook format) with the express intention of catching up and finally completing the tensely compelling epic.

Third outing Abductions! gathers the moodily monochrome Sixties-set follow-up first seen in a manner both Byzantine and fitting. In May 1998, Indy heavyweight Caliber began The Silent Invasion: Abductions but the miniseries folded after one issue, only to be picked up by NBM in 2001 and successfully released as 5-issue sequence Secret Messagescourtesy of Cherkas, Hancock and auxiliary artist Paul McCusker. It ran from May 2001 to May 2002, presumably despite the best efforts of Greys, Lizards or Deep Government interventions…

The truth out here continues after an informative and coolly appraising Introduction ‘Here We Go Again’, from novelist Robert J. Sawyer (FlashForward, The Oppenheimer Alternative). However, before all that…

The 1950s in American were a hugely iconic and paradoxical time. Incomparable scientific and cultural advancements, great wealth and desperate, intoxicating optimism inexplicably arose amidst an atmosphere of immense social, cultural, racial, sexual and political repression with an increasingly paranoid populace seeing conspiracy and subversive attacks in every shadow and corner of the rest of the world.

Such an insular melting pot couldn’t help but be fertile soil for imaginative outsiders to craft truly incisive and evocative tales dripping with convoluted mystery and taut tension, especially when wedded to the nation’s fantastic – and then-ongoing – obsessions with rogue science, flying saucers, gangsterism and espionage…

They were also obsessed with hot babes and bust sizes, but more of that elsewhere…

What Has Gone Before: In April 1952, notorious Union City private eye Dick Mallet saw a strange light in the night sky. Next morning the cops found his empty, crashed automobile. A month later reporter Matt Sinkage was still getting grief from Frank Costello, Editor of the Union City Sentinel. Matt was frantic to expose “The Truth behind Flying Saucers” but quickly became an ostracised laughing stock, especially since he also suspected his foreign-sounding neighbour Ivan Kalashnikov was a Russian spy….

Sinkage alienated his family and drove his fiancée Peggy Black to distraction. All he could think about was a night six months previously in Albany when he witnessed a UFO and impetuously chased after it: a crazy night everyone remembers… except him.

When Matt broke into Ivan’s apartment, he saw the foreigner and others in front of a huge, weird machine. It confirmed his suspicions that they were Atomic spies. Days later, Matt collided with Mr K’s pretty friend Gloria Amber and cunningly asked her out to lunch. Things developed and Gloria begged him to save her from what she claimed were Red agents even though the thugs subsequently claimed to be Federal agents…

Hiding out at his brother Walter‘s place, Matt was still seeing flying saucers everywhere and couldn’t understand why everybody else thought they were just jets. In Union City, Frank was pressured by brutish FBI Agent Phil Housley: an old acquaintance who regularly forced him to suppress unwelcome or troubling news items…

This time he wanted Sinkage. What no newsman knew was that Housley was also working for a shadowy agency calling itself The Council. What Housley didn’t know was that he was only a pawn…

Back in suburbia, Walter’s wife Katie – convinced Matt and his new floozy Gloria were up to no good – reached out to the FBI. The fugitives were heading out in Walter’s car when Peggy showed up. She couldn’t understand why her man was with a flashy trollop, and wouldn’t accept that Matt only wanted the lowdown on the Reds and access to Kalashnikov’s memoirs and files. Matt knew Gloria was playing a double game, but agreed to go with to a remote town where a “contact” could protect them both…

Mr K called in his own heavies to hunt them, all factions equally unaware that the FBI had visited Katie and a net was closing around Sinkage and his mystery woman…

When the Council learn Sinkage was involved in the “Albany event”, near-panic ensued. Matt eventually succumbed to suspicion. Gloria kept vanishing and refused to acknowledge it. and Kalashnikov’s hoods Zanini and Koldst abduct her and rough up Matt.

Events spiralled and came to a head in sleepy Stubbinsville. Housley and the FBI tracked the runaways and met up with the Reds and what might well have been aliens in the isolated region. The net closed around them as a fantastic and terrifying light-show ignited the dark skies. By the time the G-Men reached them, Gloria had vanished and Sinkage was in a coma. Days later, Matt was freed and all charges dropped. He was strangely content. Despite another blatant cover-up and no clue as to whom all the various parties hounding them really were, Sinkage knew what he had seen when Gloria vanished. Now he could only wait for her inevitable return…

Three years later, in September 1955, Sinkage was still waiting. He had spent much of that time in an asylum. On release, he moved to bucolic Rockhaven and resumed his old trade as a journalist. The uncaring outsider had tentatively established himself in the small town, but his job at The Ranger paid a pittance and offered no satisfaction. Sinkage earns extra cash writing fake news for spurious tabloid The Tattler.

His life spirals again after a proposed piece on cattle mutilations leads to a quasi-religious space cult in his own backyard. At first journalistic sight, the Sirian Utopia Foundation is a long con gulling wealthy widow Gladys Tanner. She devoutly believes the world is heading for imminent Armageddon and that her new gurus are in contact with a benign cosmic council promising enlightenment and global paradise …and they can also reunite her with her departed husband…

Her followers include many prominent Washington politicians and Sinkage’s research connects them to a bunch of missing scientists. That’s when Housley turns up, acting all buddy-buddy. Matt lapses into his old suspicions and starts snooping, “discovering” – after many tribulations and threats – that an extremely unconvincing fake flying saucer in the Tanner barn is a prop disguising the real thing…

The Council’s top thug Brennan resurfaces, spouting drivel about a commie conspiracy at the Tanner farm. Sinkage even thinks long-gone Kalashnikov has returned, but once again, drastic action by the Feds seemingly ends the investigation. Sinkage is now convinced of what’s really going on: America and the world are in the midst of a sly alien conquest and only he can expose it.

His first move is to join his recently at-liberty nemesis in Housely Investigations back in Union City, even though it means moving back in with Walter and his despicable sister-in-law Katie. By May 1958, Sinkage has become a phantom celebrity, a flying saucer freak and UFOlogist regularly cited by the media, but seldom seen. He warns of invasion and stalks political rising star and Presidential hopeful Senator Harrison T. Callahan – a candidate he believes to be mind-controlled by the invaders.

By 1959, Sinkage is an anonymous star on television, stridently declaring how aliens seize minds and program brains. His campaign against Callahan continues unabated. When the Senator decides to end to harassment, The Council re-enter the life of long-sidelined Phil Housley, proclaiming the alien issue is a Soviet plot to destabilise the USA. Over Walter’s most strenuous objections Katie manoeuvres to get Sinkage back into the asylum and he disappears from their lives…

In August, Callahan officially announces his candidacy and Sinkage makes a last desperate move, determined to preserve humanity at all costs…

In volume three (available in monochrome trade paperback and digital formats), the spotlight settles on Housley as ‘A Good Lawyer is Hard to Find’ sees the grizzled world-weary Private Eye basking in old glory in September 1965.

Nobody really cares anymore how he saved the life of America’s next president in August 1959, or that he had to kill a crazy reporter to do it. Now Housley’s life is all about making ends meet, accommodating his estranged wife Vivian while still seeing his kids, and keeping secretary/girlfriend Meredith Baxter from shouting at him. Union City, meanwhile, is reeling from a string of bizarre serial killings…

With life constantly kicking him hard, Phil finds an unexpected upside when glamourous new client Sarah Finster hires him to find her missing husband. She’s something of a maneater, exceedingly generous and will do literally anything to locate her innocuous spouse Howard…

The missing man is an attorney at prestigious Phelps, Finster and Phelan: Simultaneously simple and uncomplicated, his only character quirk is that he suffers blackouts: disappearing for days at a time and reappearing with no knowledge of where he’s been or that any time has passed. That’s when Housley really starts paying attention. After all, he’s been experiencing exactly the same problems lately…

Finster had been seeing a shrink about the problem, a doctor named Jeffrey Plunck, but before tracking him down Phil interviews the employers and learns more than he bargained for. They reveal that not only had Howard been disappearing and experiencing memory problems for more than a year, he also claimed to have been abducted by aliens…

The mystery deepens in ‘Ghosts are Hard to Bury’ as Housley contacts creepily officious Dr. Plunck and is stonewalled in a manner he thought only Feds could pull off. Heading home to Meredith, he falls asleep in front of new TV sensation Canadian Football and has a chilling dream about Matt Sinkage, the madman he killed to save current US President Callahan…

When an envelope arrives, containing a note to meet and a recent photo of a number of people including Plunck and the impossibly still-alive Sinkage, Phil dashes off to a seedy club and meets Nora Marsh: Howard’s probable girl on the side and another regular alien abductee.

He has no idea he’s being shadowed until he’s ambushed. When he regains consciousness, Nora is gone but she’s left a list of names which lead to the missing Howard. Bringing the bemused and bewildered lawyer home, Phil is suddenly blasted by blazing light and awakens having lost more time… and memories…

‘Canadian, Eh’ opens with dazed and confused Phil revisiting all he knows about Sinkage and confronting the reporter’s former boss Frank Costello. He learns the paper Nora gave him lists people who have recently died or been murdered in uncanny circumstances. Walter Sinkage then adds fuel to the insane alien nonsense by expounding a raft of crazy suppositions about Canada’s Flying Saucer programme – and their football exploits – leaving Housley more baffled than ever and blithely unaware of how many different people have him under observation.

And that’s when the bodies start piling up and circumstantially pointing to Phil, his increasingly troubled homelife and those oh-so-convenient memory black-outs…

As witnesses and potential allies vanish or die, and with a procedural net he’s very used to holding now closing around him, Phil goes into overdrive in ‘The Lost and the Found’. On the run but uncharacteristically determined to find answers, Housley raids Dr. Plunck’s office, stumbling upon an incredible secret (more than one, in fact), provoking a massive and deadly response from his hidden foes, and precipitating a savage and chaotic clash with the resurgent forces of The Council and the irresistible powers behind them in chilling conclusion ‘Falling into the Light’…

To Be Concluded…

Gripping and utterly addictive, The Silent Invasion is a uniquely beguiling confection rendered in a compelling, spectacularly expressionistic style: an epic that perpetually twists and turns, leaving readers dazed, dazzled and always hungry for more. Tragically, its warped Machiavellian shenanigans have never been more relevant than now and lead me to conclude that the infiltration is complete and that weird inexplicable non-humans already stalk all earthly corridors of power…

Abductions! offers an unforgettable gateway to an eerily familiar yet comfortably exotic era of innocent joy and a million “top secrets” which no fan of fantastic thriller fiction should ignore and the best is still to come…
© 1998, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2012 and 2020 Michael Cherkas & Larry Hancock. All rights reserved.

Most NBM books are also available in digital formats. For more information and other great reads see http://www.nbmpub.com/

Posted on

School for Extraterrestrial Girls volume 1: Girl on Fire


By Jeremy Whitley & Jamie Noguchi (Papercutz)
ISBN: 978-1-54580-492-6 (HB) 978-1-54580-493-3 (TPB)

Once upon a time, stories designed to enthral and entertain young girls were a prolific staple of comics output. By the end of the 20th century the sector had all but faded from the English-speaking world, but enjoyed a splendid resurgence – particularly in America – as the graphic novel market expanded to its current prominence.

Based in New York, Papercutz are committed to publishing comics material for younger readers – especially girls – and combine licensed properties such as The Smurfs, Gumby and Nancy Drew with intriguing European imports like Brina the Cat and compelling new concepts such as The Wendy Project. This supremely enticing premier volume from Jeremy Whitley (The Unstoppable Wasp, Princeless) & Jamie Noguchi (Erfworld) is home grown, but magnificently captures a few contemporary zeitgeists that seem certain to generate huge interest and probably a TV series…

Tara Smith is 15-years old, smart, diligent and extremely hard-working. She obeys her rather strict, cold parents and strives at all times to be good and succeed in all her endeavours. In her most private moments, she stares at the stars and feels that one day she will be extraordinary, especially if she manages to fulfil her longed-for destiny…

She is admittedly a bit odd. Her life is totally regulated and Tara takes special medicine every day. She also wears an electronic medical alarm bracelet 24/7 as well as an heirloom necklace. She never, ever takes them off…

However, even though her life is one of unremitting routine, one day the alarm clock doesn’t go off and Tara will never be the same again…

As a result of the timing malfunction and rushing for the school bus, Tara forgets to take her pills. It’s a day for disasters. She trips, breaks her bracelet and, even after frantically making it to school on time, feels weird all day. After terrorising her classmates and making an exhibition of herself, Tara ends the day by catching on fire, rushing through the school like a human torch and passing out in the showers…

When she awakens, she’s in a freezer with her bracelet missing and confronted by the formidable presence of female MIB Agent Stone. When she makes Tara remove the necklace the terrified girl instantly transforms into a reptilian being and catches fire again. Suspicions confirmed, Stone swiftly explains some unsavoury facts of life to her shellshocked captive…

Before long Tara is despatched to a very special top-secret school built to house and safeguard girls just like her: young alien refugees abandoned or trapped on Earth and educated under the directives of numerous clandestine treaties, all unsuspected by the greater mass of humanity which still believes itself to be the only life in the universe…

Thus begins a thrilling epic as Tara gradually assimilates into her new school (Blacksite 513 AKA The School for Extraterrestrial Girls), making friends, enemies and many, many mistakes as she slowly uncovers the secrets of her hidden past and an awful truth regarding her own existence on Earth…

And as if just surviving being the new girl isn’t hard enough, as she continues hiding in human form and denying her true saurian self, events spiral out of control when Tara’s “parents” stage a deadly raid to reclaim their “property”. That’s when the confused reptilian finally learns who her real friends are…

Moreover, in the aftermath Stone decides the campus has been fatally compromised and that for security she must move students and faculty into a facility already occupied by Extraterrestrial boys…

To Be Continued…

Championing diversity and tolerance, whilst subtly addressing issues of gender, puberty and peer acceptance, this rollicking action romp successfully blends and updates the traditional girls boarding school/extraordinary chums model that was the backbone of British girls comics for decades and now seems set to shape the lives of another generation of youngsters looking for understanding and a few appropriate role models.

Irresistible fun no one should miss and available in hardcover, paperback and digital editions, School for Extraterrestrial Girls is drama and thrills in perfect balance to delight any young adult or wistfully nostalgic parent or guardian.
© 2020 Jeremy Whitley and Jamie Noguchi. All other editorial material © Papercutz.

Posted on

Pure Trance


By Junko Mizuno (jaPress/Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-878-2 (HB)

If you’re over a certain age or have eclectic tastes in art and music, you might feel a pang of nostalgia at this remastered work of coyly adults-only fiction: the first subversively compelling creation of iconic Manga master Junko Mizuno.

Since her emergence in 1995, the author has become renowned – more accurately, infamous – for mixing childhood innocence with grim, gory action and unwholesome or stridently clashing, wildly inappropriate content in a sub-genre now dubbed Gothic or Noir kawaii (where kawaii describes cutely drawn protagonists and subjects).

Moreover, the skewed sensibilities of such works as Cinderalla, Hansel & Gretel, Princess Mermaid, Momongo no Isshō (the Life of Momongo), Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu and Ravina the Witch has escaped the comics ghetto to be embraced by a larger fashion-based audience with art exhibitions (Heart Throbs and Tender Succubus), art-books (Hell Babies, Collector File and Flare) and high-end designer toys for adults which include plush animals, vinyl figures, stationery, postcards, stickers, original art T-shirts and a line of condoms and erotic paraphernalia.

Her shojo-derived style (that’s “stories for girls”, in case you’re wondering) also borrows heavily from the most iconic imagery of the 1960s and early 1970s, particularly the Graphic Psychedelia which grew out of Pop Art. Her stars and support characters are huge eyed, large-headed poppet girls, drawn to look young or, more accurately, actively, innocently, illicitly under-aged: all acting in simplified environments where detail is reduced to bare minima.

The stories are always sharply at odds with her drawing style – like cartoons for toddlers, but involving unpleasant visits to the gynaecologist or being consumed by cannibals – and much of her material incorporates splashy full colour despite the overwhelming preponderance of black and white material in Japan.

Rereleased in tactilely-satisfying hardback and ebook editions, Pure Trance is strictly monochrome throughout and was the auteur’s first official book, even though it is, in fact, a compilation of a minicomics series created to be given away with CD music albums. From 1996-1998 these deeply disturbing Sci Fi adventures of hard-pressed nurses and beauticians in a dystopian future were included in Pure Trance volumes 11 to 20.

I can’t help but wonder what the blissed-out music fans made of the creepily tongue-in-cheek horror stories, but at least the work reached a more amenable audience when Mizuno revised and updated the pamphlets in 1998 for a single book edition. That was first translated into English in 2005 and now it’s back again…

I hesitate to attempt a précis of this wonderfully baroque extravaganza of sugar ‘n’ spice, unnecessary surgical procedures, creeping mutant terrors, animal antics, walk-in Eating Disorder clinics, fetish and bondage catalogues and the indomitable triumph of the human spirit over its own darkest desires, but the chilling whimsy unleashed here is a brilliant and intoxicating progression that needs some highlighting, so…

In the aftermath of WW3, Earth is a toxic wasteland and humanity has retreated underground. Deep beneath Tokyo, society carries on but is currently beleaguered by a plague of uncontrollable hunger: an unappetising condition dubbed “hyperorexia” which is caused by the life-sustaining Pure Trance pill everyone takes. In a bleak commercialised underworld, the condition is treated by dedicated clinicians in specialised hospitals…

Our story focuses on Overeaters Treatment Center 102 and its deviant director Keiko Yamazaki; an officious, drug-abusing, sadistic tyrant who makes life hell for the poor nurses under her command. Her cruel practises – such as humiliation, torture and eating any animal (artificial or real) unfortunate enough to fall into her clutches – eventually sparks a revolution, but not before some of her subordinates make a daring and desperate dash for the abandoned surface world to discover things both amazing and life-changing…

Supplemented by info pin-ups highlighting the many characters wandering about and accompanied by sidebar inserts detailing people, places, beasts, items of interest and key moments under the designation “Pure Trance Trivia”, this epic exploration of an uncanny alternate tomorrow is both splendid and terrifying.

Everything, especially the legion of pretty girls, is drawn in the style of early Playboy icons, in the brand of cartoon stylisations that featured in movie title sequences like What’s New, Pussycat? or Yellow Submarine. Anybody British who remembers the children’s animation Crystal Tipps and Alistair, or the hippo from Rainbow, will feel a frisson of nostalgia – which is of course the point. The art is an irresistible velvet trap designed to reduce readers to a receptive state in which the author can make telling points about contemporary culture.

By co-opting children’s entertainment Mizuno addresses fundamental aspects of human existence in a form designed to shock, subvert, upset and most importantly, provoke. So, if some thought on the readers’ part extends beyond our old-fashioned, but still visceral gut-reaction to innocent girls in distress and the ridiculous and idealistic spiritual purity that used to be associated with such imagery, then she’s done her job…

This groundbreaking social satire is a supremely edgy and funny fantasy with plenty to say about society, relationships and the planet we should be safeguarding – especially now, when and where we’re all under similar pressures of isolation and survival.
© 2005, 2019 Junko Mizuno. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Liebestrasse


By Greg Lockard, Tim Fish, Héctor Barros, Lucas Gattoni (Greg Lockard/ComiXology Originals)
No ISBN: digital only.

I’m ending our salute to Gay Pride and LGBTQ publishing with a little something that encapsulates the core concept of the entire issue: the right to love and be loved by whoever you choose. In our history, that’s been a long hard battle and one not won yet, but if you never start anything, you’ll never finish and I firmly believe bigotry is ultimately self-defeating. I just wish it was a faster process and that our opposition was more reasonable and less fanatical…

Set firmly in the footsteps of Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, this tale of regret and thwarted love comes from writer Greg Lockard and artist Tim Fish, aided and abetted by Héctor Barros on colours with Lucas Gattoni providing letters and calligraphy.

The story opens covertly in the Land of the Free in 1952 as an aging, wealthy man seeks solace and the company of “his own kind” in a very special bar…

The next day, Sam Wells visits a modern art exhibition where a brief encounter with a young man of similar tastes triggers a flashback to an old friend. Soon after, Wells is flying to Berlin to establish new business contacts and, hopefully, relive the better moments of his past.

As he moves about the divided city, Wells’ mind flits back to 1932 when, as a young Mover & Shaker, he was posted to Germany to set up an overseas office for his company. For a young man of wealth and his particular tastes, the Weimar Republic offered many opportunities, temptations and, crucially, freedom from dangerous oversight. However, there was also a sense of oppressive menace, especially after meeting audacious, outspoken Philip Adler… and falling madly, passionately, head over heels in love.

Philip’s sister Hilde was already in the sights of the rising National Socialists for creating un-Aryan art, but his constant challenging of the party in words, and especially with his “degenerate” lifestyle, soon painted a target on all their backs, as well as on the numerous doomed and dancing-on-the-volcano’s-edge liberals Sam met at parties in in the music clubs…

As the months passed, the affair intensified – as did the danger – and inevitably, the hammer fell. For Sam that meant a beating and deportation, but for Philip there was no such callous leniency. Now decades later, Wells is back and has to face Hilde again…

Forceful, frantic, passionate and deeply moving, Liebestrasse is a powerful testament to the abiding power and wonder of passion and a sobering reminder of how far we’ve come: an irrefutable argument for live and let love…
LIEBESTRASSE © 2019 Greg Expectations, LLC & Timothy Poisson. All rights reserved.

Posted on

Y the Last Man Book Three


By Brian K. Vaughan, Pia Guerra, Goran Sudžuka & various (DC/Vertigo)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-2578-0 (HB) 978-1-4012-5880-1 (TPB)

Back in 2002, an old, venerable and cherished science fiction concept got a smart and satirical updating in Vertigo comic book series Y: The Last Man. These days it’s more relevant than ever as the premise explores the aftermath and consequences of a virulent global plague.

When a mystery contagion killed every male on Earth, only amateur stage magician, escapologist and all-round slacker goof-ball Yorick Brown and his pet monkey Ampersand survived in a world suddenly and utterly all girl.

Since his politician mother is high in America’s new government, Yorick is a highly prized and top-secret commodity. After a number of potential catastrophic incidents, he is condemned to covertly travel with conflicted secret agent 355 and maverick geneticist Dr. Allison Mann across the devastated American continent to her state-of-the-art laboratory. Mann believes she somehow caused the patriarchal apocalypse by self-inseminating and giving birth to the world’s first parthenogenetic human clone, but all young Yorick can think of is re-uniting with his girlfriend/fiancée Beth, cut off and trapped in Australia ever since the world was abruptly unmanned. As far as Brown is concerned, the geneticist’s Californian retreat is about halfway to his most cherished goal…

The trek is slow, arduous and fraught with peril and revelation: one none of the voyagers initially realise is dogged with stealthy intrigue and hostile surveillance from the start. Hard on their heels is a cult of crazed women determined to erase every vestige of male influence and achievement: modern “Daughters of the Amazon” determined to eradicate the accursed Y chromosome entirely from planet Earth. They are racing against a team of Israeli commandos whose commander is determined that the Promised Land will have sons again, no matter what the cost. Tragically, they are not the only or worst of the special interests hunting Yorick…

This third compilation – available in hardcover, trade paperback and eBook formats – collects issues #24-36, spanning September 2004-October 2005 and opens with a 2-parter by originators and co-creators Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. In case you were wondering, the entire book is inked by José Marzán Jr, coloured by Zylonol and lettered by Clem Robbins.

In ‘Tongues of Flame’ events move into higher gear as Dr. Mann and the formerly-fanatical secret agent who has been thanklessly bodyguarding Yorick both reach turning points in their own particular journeys. Suddenly on his own, Yorick finds reaffirmation in a climactic and far from spiritual meeting with faux nun Beth, who is solitarily expiating her own sins in a commandeered catholic church. Sadly, their moment in paradise is ruined by marauding Amazons. The reputed last man alive then uses all his conjuring tricks to return the disfavour…

Meanwhile in the Australian Outback, a couple of lost Americans make an unpleasant discovery and run into a spot of bother…

‘Hero’s Journey’ switches focus to Yorick’s previously deranged sister. Hero Brown has been stalking the expedition across the ravaged and now generally dis-United States, plagued by memories of her own childhood and difficult adolescence. The reverie also encompasses the night all the men died and how the traumatised paramedic swiftly fell under the sway of psychotic chief Amazon Victoria.

Hero’s long walk takes her to the plains of Kansas and a secret government facility, where twin American biologists and former Russian agent Natalya Zamyatin are guarding the planet’s greatest secret and penultimate hope for humanity…

For the entire saga thus far, Yorick has been carrying a wedding band for his Beth. ‘Ring of Truth’ finally reveals the history of the piece and the strange provenance it carries in a flashback to a chance encounter in a magic shop.

In the present, the trekkers have reunited in San Francisco. After Agent 355 has a lethal confrontation with her ex-comrades (and rival covert organisation the Setauket Ring), Dr. Mann actually discovers the secret of the last man’s immunity to the disease that killed all those guys. Sadly, it coincides with Yorick being overcome with a mystery ailment that seems to present like the haemorrhagic bug which wiped out all the other men…

Remember the monkey? As all the crises converge, and Hero appears to save the day, Ampersand is stolen by one of the aforementioned sinister forces following them and expeditiously shipped abroad. Once Yorick recovers, it becomes absolutely imperative that the team rescue him from captivity. That means a frantic trip to Japan but all Yorick can think of is how he’s getting ever closer to Beth in Australia…

Goran Sudžuka steps in for issues #32-35 as ‘Girl on Girl’ finds the wanderers in warm pursuit on repurposed cruise liner/cargo boat The Whale. When every male creature on Earth expired, Yorick’s true love was on an anthropology field trip in the Australian Outback, and all his previous adventures have been geared to eventually reuniting with her, despite the collapse of civilisation, and the mass extinction event that is gradually eliminating all higher life on Earth.

Sailing, for the Port of Yokogata – a destination that has particular significance for Dr. Mann – Yorick and his retinue are now painfully aware that Ampersand has been ape-napped by a mysterious ninja because he apparently holds the secret to the mystery of the plague which removed all us mouth-breathing, unsanitary louts.

Whilst aboard ship, Yorick’s drag disguise yet again fails and his concomitant and somewhat unwilling liaison with the lusty ship’s Captain is only thwarted by a torpedo fired by the Australian Navy. It seems that the commander has a few secrets of her own – and a highly illegal sideline…

After a brutal battle and more pointless bloodshed it seems the lad is fated to go to Oz after all, despite the depredations of pirates, drug runners, ninja-assassins and the imminent return of old foe General Alter Tse’elon and her renegade cadre of Israeli commandos…

Yorick isn’t absolutely sure Beth Deville is actually still alive, but we are, after the last chapter tells her life story and hints that when her man comes for her, she might not actually be there anymore…

Guerra returns for ‘Boy Loses Girl’ #36 (the entire script for which bolsters the back of this already-bountiful feast of adult fun and frolic) detailing how a typical student love story becomes a life-altering hallucinogenic spiritual walkabout for Beth and how her decision inadvertently derails every plan the Last Man ever laid…

By honing to the spirit of this admittedly overused premise but by carefully building strong, credible characters and situations, Vaughan & Guerra have crafted an intellectually seductive fantasy soap-opera of remarkable power: one every mature comics fan should enjoy.
© 2004, 2005, 2015 Brian K. Vaughan & Pia Guerra. All Rights Reserved.

Posted on

Chimpanzee Complex volumes 1 (Paradox); 2 (The Sons of Ares) & 3 (Civilisation)


By Richard Marazano & Jean-Michel Ponzio, translated by Jerome Saincantin (Cinebook)
ISBN: 978-1-84918-002-3 (Album PB Paradox), 978-1-84918-015-3 (Album PB The Sons of Ares), 978-1-84918-043-6 (Album PB Civilisation)

One thing French comics creators excel at is challenging, mind-blowing, astoundingly entertaining science fiction. Whether the boisterous, mind-boggling space opera of Valerian and Laureline, the surreal spiritual exploration of Moebius’ Airtight Garage or the tense, tech-heavy brooding of Orbital, our Gallic cousins always got it: the genre is not about hardware or monsters; it’s about people encountering new and uncanny ideas…

Prolific, multi award-winning Richard Marazano was born in Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1971. He initially pursued a career in science before switching to Fine Arts courses in Angoulême. He debuted in bande dessinée in the mid 1990s. Although an extremely impressive artist and colourist when illustrating his own stories (Le Bataillon des Lâches, Le Syndrome d’Abel), he is best known for his collaborations with other artists such as Michel Durand (Cuervos), Marcelo Frusin (L’Expédition) and Xavier Delaporte (Chaabi) to name just a few.

His partnerships with artist Jean-Michel Ponzio are especially fruitful and rewarding. As well as Le Complexe du Chimpanzé – the trilogy under discussion here available singly in trade paper and digitally, but not yet in one epic edition – the daring duo produced the taut, intricate social futurism of Genetiksâ„¢ and high-flying paranoiac cautionary tale Le Protocole Pélican.

Jean-Michel Ponzio was born in Marignane and, after a period of scholastic pick-&-mix during the 1980s, began working as a filmmaker and animator for the advertising industry. He moved into movies, designing backgrounds and settings; listing Fight Club and Batman and Robin among his many subtle successes.

In 2000, he started moonlighting as an illustrator of book covers and edged into comics four years later, creating the art for Laurent Genfort’s T’ien Keou, before writing and illustrating Kybrilon for publisher Soliel in 2005. This led to a tidal wave of bande dessinée assignments before he began his association with Marazano in 2007. He’s still very, very busy and his stunning combination of photorealist painting, 3D design and rotoscoping techniques grace and enhance a multitude of comics from authors as varied as Richard Malka to Janhel.

Cinebook began publishing The Chimpanzee Complex in 2009 with the beguiling and enigmatic Paradox, which introduces the world to a bizarre and baffling cosmic conundrum…

February 2035: experienced but frustrated astronaut Helen Freeman is still reeling from the latest round of cutbacks which have once again mothballed NASA’s plans to send an expedition to Mars. The young mother is resigned to living an Earthbound life in Florida with the daughter she has neglected for so long, but just as she tentatively begins to repair her relationship with young, headstrong Sofia, her world is again turned upside down when a call comes from her ex-bosses.

Bowing to the inevitable despite Sophia’s strident objections, she and old boss Robert Conway are whisked away under the tightest of security conditions to a US aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean under the draconian control of Top Brass Spook Konrad Stealberg.

Here they learn that, days previously, an unidentified object splashed down from space and was recovered by divers.

The artefact was the Command Module of Apollo 11 and it carried the still-living Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin: legendary heroes forever mythologised as the first men to walk on the moon. Baffled and bewildered, the recovered astronauts have steadfastly refused to speak to anybody except NASA representatives…

Helen is the first to get any information from them, and whilst Stealberg’s technicians check every bolt, wire and component of the capsule, she and Robert carefully quiz their greatest idols. When the lost astronauts learn they have been in space for 66 years they are horrified. When they realise that history records they returned safely and died unremarkably years later, they go ballistic: exhibiting what Freeman describes as the traumatic shock response peculiar to space voyagers categorised by NASA as “the Chimpanzee Complex”…

Impatient martinet Stealberg has harder questions: if – as every test they can think of indicates these men are the real thing, who or what landed on Earth all those decades ago?

And most importantly, when they were feted by the world in 1969, was third astronaut Michael Collins – who never walked on Luna – one of us or one of “them”?

Exerting military privilege, he peremptorily kicks Conway out whilst pressganging Helen onto his staff, and transfers the mystery-nauts and their capsule to his ultra-secure Red Hills Creek Base in Colorado…

Helpless but conflicted, Freeman plays along, enjoining Robby to explain and take care of Sofia. If she had been angry before, the daughter’s reaction to this further enforced absence from a mother she feels doesn’t want her will be terrible indeed…

Events move very fast at the paranoid levels of the Military-Industrial complex, and as Helen continues her interviews with the biologically-perfect astronauts, she begins to discover inconsistencies and memory-lapses in their stories.

That’s enough for Stealberg to initiate other, harsher procedures, but before they can be implemented Helen is awoken from fantastically real dreams of exploring Mars to a new crisis: Armstrong and Aldrin are dead. From the state of their corpses they have been for decades…

In Florida Robby is still trying to assuage Sofia’s feelings, telling her Mum will be home soon. There’s no chance of that, though, as Stealberg has moved on with his plans and arranged a private meeting with the President.

The result is the re-commissioning of the completed – but mothballed – Mars exploration shuttle, with the intention of revisiting the site of the Apollo moon landings. As NASA’s top flier and an expert on the Mars vehicle, Helen is going too… whether she wants to or not.

Twelve days later, amidst massive public uproar and speculation at the ludicrous cover story for the sudden moon-shot, Helen and her crew meet the rest of the exploration team and she realises with horror that her professional career is based on a lie.

NASA has never had an American monopoly on spaceflight: the military had been running a clandestine, parallel black-book program since the very start, funded by siphoning the Agency’s operating budget and personally instigated by ex-Nazi rocket pioneer Werner von Braun…

The launch is televised around the world, trumpeted as a final shakedown flight before closing the costly space program forever. Aboard the blazing javelin, Helen and close companion Aleksa ponder the coincidence of heading for the moon in the week they were originally scheduled to take off for Mars, but are more concerned that mission leader Stealberg has filled the shuttle with mysterious, classified containers…

All too soon, the vehicle establishes lunar orbit and a Lander touches down on the most hallowed site in the history of technology. It’s a huge shock: the paraphernalia left by the missions doesn’t match the records and there is a strange trail of footprints. Following them, the terrified explorers discover the mummified, space-suited, long-dead bodies of Armstrong and Aldrin, even as, high above them pilot Kurt matches velocities with a piece of space junk and discovers the Apollo 11 Command Module…with Collins’ corpse in it…

Moreover, there’s a recorded distress message in the primitive computers: a 66-year old Russian cry for aid originating from Mars…

And that’s when Stealberg reveals his biggest secret, summoning booster rockets and a second-stage shuttle from deep orbit whilst breaking out the cryogenic coffins that will keep the crew alive as they travel on to Mars and an appointment with the truth, whatever it might be…

Second volume The Sons of Ares opens in October 2035, focussing on Freeman’s best friend. NASA bureaucrat Robert Conway has struggled to look after the increasingly wayward Sofia. Increasingly off-the-rails, she argues and acts out, whilst in interplanetary space the fourth month of the journey finds American astronauts Paul Dupree and Mark Lawrence taking their boring turn awake for monitor duty, whilst their comrades endure resource-saving but life-shortening hibernation. The monotony is suddenly broken by a freak radiation storm. Only one of the terrified explorers makes it to the ship’s shielded area in time…

In Florida, Robert is acutely conscious of his failings as a surrogate parent, just as Helen is blissfully unaware of the personal crisis when her slumbering crew rouse from cold sleep to find Paul insane and Mark missing…

In reporting the situation to Earth, Helen again misses – or perhaps avoids – a chance to speak to Sofia – who is gradually coming to terms with the possibility that she might never see her mother again…

As the shuttle at last establishes Mars orbit, Paul is locked up for his own safety and the suspicious voyagers’ peace of mind. Konrad then shares intel gathered by his agents on Earth whilst they slept. The Soviet clandestine Cosmonaut project began in 1963, headed by space pioneer Yuri Gagarin – whose death had been faked to facilitate his smooth transition to commander of their Mars shot.

Expecting a monumental propaganda coup, the Kremlin simply said nothing when contact was lost with Gagarin’s mission, preferring stolid rhetoric to incontrovertible proof of failure. Now, with so many inexplicable events inevitably leading to the Red Planet, Stealberg expects Helen and her team to find all the answers with the Russians’ bodies on the dust surface. He couldn’t be more wrong…

Locating a base at the polar cap, Konrad dispatches his heavily armed crew to the site even as on Earth, Sofia runs away from home. However even whilst experiencing her greatest desire – walking on another world – Helen can’t help but worry about Paul, doped up and locked into the isolation chamber of the otherwise empty Shuttle…

Whilst Robert frantically searches for Sofia on Earth, the astronauts are astounded to discover the primitive landing site and corpses they expected are, in actuality, a thriving, efficient facility, stuffed with botanical wonders and manned by the very strong and vital cosmonauts who had landed there in the1960s.

After an initial exchange of hostilities – and gunfire – friendly contact is established and another incomprehensible tale unfolds. Russians Vladimir and Borislav have lost all sense of time in the “twelve years” since they landed and Commander Gargarin – having discovered a strange tunnel in a Martian glacier – has been absent for most of that period. They only know he’s still alive because food keeps vanishing…

Stealberg, seeing uncomfortable similarities in the agelessness of the cosmonauts and the duplicate Armstrong and Aldrin on Earth, sedates the Russians, who constantly ramble about the nature of reality, but Helen’s interest is piqued and, with Kurt’s assistance, she sneaks off into the glacier tunnel to find Gagarin…

When she succeeds, it only leads to more baffling questions. The First Man in Space perpetually stares into the unyielding ice-wall, seemingly unsurprised by Helen’s reports on the Apollo returnees, the impossible time-differentials and the fall of the Soviet Union.

He merely ruminates on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, and whether such a subatomic phenomenon could apply to larger constructs – such as human beings – in a constant and simultaneous state of being and non-being: a “probability of presence”…

They also converse about children they will probably never see again…

As Helen returns to the greenhouse module, the Russians are planning more armed resistance, but Stealberg has an even more pressing problem. Much to Helen’s astonished disbelief, he’s found Gagarin’s 60-years-dead corpse…

As Vladimir and Borislav attack, setting fire to the modules, the Americans fall back to their vehicle, dragging the now hysterical Helen, who has promised her very much alive Yuri Gagarin a ride home…

The tension increases when they re-enter the orbiting Shuttle: Paul has vanished and no trace can be found of him. Thoroughly rattled, Konrad orders an immediate return to Earth, with increased watches for every day of the trip.

May 2036: on Earth Robert has tracked down Sofia and they both eagerly await Helen’s return at Cape Canaveral. However, as the Shuttle nears Earth it suddenly vanishes from all tracking systems. Aboard the vessel, Helen and Kurt experience the horror of seeing their home planet vanish. Unable to brake the shuttle, and with no world in view, they rejoin the others in cold sleep, not knowing when they will next awaken or even if they will still be in their solar system when they do.

Helen’s last conscious thoughts are of the daughter she may never see again…

Concluding volume Civilisation completes the trilogy by picking up in the Great Unknown as hibernation ends after 70 years. Only Helen and Aleksa remain alive, all the other cryo-capsules having failed at some indeterminate time.

With only finite resources and dwindling power, Helen consoles herself by catching up on messages beamed in hope and anticipation by Robbie Cooper, but is roused from her fatalistic depression by Aleksa who has made a shocking discovery…

Seeing one of the EVA suits missing, he at first believed their comrade Alex had committed suicide by walking out of the airlock. Then he saw the impossibly huge unidentified space ship and called Helen…

Suiting up and arming themselves, they cross to the vessel, Helen further encumbered by a laptop with all the messages – read and unread – from Cooper stored on it. They have no idea when Alex left, or if she even tried to reach the UFO. However, as it’s their only hope of survival, they make a leap into the void and, after great struggle, find themselves in a vast and terrifying mechanical chamber of disturbing proportions.

Alex’s abandoned gear is on the floor. She had clearly camped there for some time before vanishing into the dark, dusty cavernous interior…

Whilst they rest and consider their next move, Helen watches the last message Robbie sent from Earth. It is sixty-seven years old…

Later, Helen freaks out when they find Alex’s empty suit, until Aleksa does the unthinkable and opens his own EVA garb. The enigma ship has warmth and a breathable atmosphere…

And then something pushes part of the vessel over on them…

Narrowly escaping harm, they cautiously explore the vessel, but after splitting up Aleksa is attacked again. When terrified Helen finds him, he is hugging the crazed, decrepit, wizened but still alive Alex. Mute but still vital, she leads them through vaulting passageways to what they can only assume is a skeleton. A really, really big one. Outside a viewing portal, Mars spins by above them. It’s as if they’ve come home…

However fast or far or forward humanity travels, their fears and foibles go with them and before long distrust and dread spark a final confrontation in the uncanny construct. Thus, only one person makes an implausible, inexplicable escape back to Earth…

It’s 2097 and as a long-missing craft splashes down in the ocean to begin the circle anew, it becomes clear that some mysteries, like some philosophies and some family bonds, remain ineffably beyond the sphere of rational thinking…

Bold, challenging and enticingly human, this astonishing science mystery dances and darts adroitly between beguiling metaphysics and hard-wired mortal passions, easily encompassing our species’ inbuilt inescapable isolation, wide-eyed wonderment, hunger to know everything and terror of finding out. Marazano’s pared-to-the-bone script is brought to hyper-life with stunning clarity by Ponzio to produce a timeless fusion of passion, paranoia and familial fulfilment. A deft blend of intrigue, hope, paranoia and abiding curiosity, The Chimpanzee Complex is a tale no lover of fantasy and suspense should ignore.

Do you read me? Do read The Chimpanzee Complex.
© Dargaud, Paris, 2007, 2008 by Marazano& Ponzio. All rights reserved. English translation © 2009, 2010 Cinebook Ltd.

Posted on

Showcase Presents Martian Manhunter


By Jack Miller, Joe Samachson, Dave Wood, Edmund Hamilton, Bob Kane, Joe Certa, Lew Sayre Schwartz & various (DC Comics)
ISBN: 978-1-4012-1368-8 (TPB)

Stress-alleviating Fun is in pretty short supply everywhere these days, but if you’re a comics fan susceptible to charming nostalgia, this item – readily available in paperback, but tragically still not compiled in any digital format yet – might just appeal to the starry-eyed wanderer in you…

As the 1950’s opened, comic book superheroes were in inescapably steep decline, giving way to a steady stream of genre-locked he-men and “Ordinary Joes” caught in extraordinary circumstances. By the time the “Red-baiting”, witch-hunting Senate hearings and media investigations into causes of juvenile delinquency had finished mid-decade, the industry was further depleted by the excision of any sort of mature content or themes.

The self-imposed Comics Code Authority took all the hard edges out of the industry, banning horror and crime comics whilst leaving their ghostly, sanitised anodyne shades to inhabit the remaining adventure, western, war and fantasy titles that remained. American comics – for which read a misperceived readership comprising only children – could have bowdlerised concepts of evil and felonious conduct, but not the simplest kind of repercussion: a world where mad scientists plotted to conquer humanity without killing anybody and cowboys shot guns out of opponents’ hands or severed gun-belts with a well-aimed bullet without ever drawing blood…

Moreover, no civil or government official or public servant could be depicted as anything other than a saint…

With corruption, venality and menace removed from the equation, comics were forced to supply punch and tension to their works via mystery and imagination – but only as long as it all had a rational, non-supernatural explanation…

Beating by a year the new Flash (who launched in Showcase #4 cover-dated October 1956) and arguably the first superhero of the Silver Age, the series depicting the clandestine adventures of stranded alien scientist J’onn J’onzz was initially entitled John Jones, Manhunter from Mars: a decent being unwillingly trapped on Earth who fought crime secretly using his incredible powers, knowledge and advanced technical abilities with no human even aware of his existence.

However, even before that low-key debut, Batman #78 trialled the concept in ‘The Manhunter From Mars!’ (August/September 1953) wherein Edmund Hamilton, Bob Kane, Lew Sayre Schwartz & Charlie Paris told the tales of Roh Kar, a lawman from the Fourth Planet who assisted the Dynamic Duo in capturing a Martian bandit plundering Gotham City. That stirring yarn opens this first magnificent monochrome compendium which also includes the eccentric, frequently formulaic but never disappointing back-up series from Detective Comics #225 to 304, spanning November 1955 – June 1962.

In one of the longest tenures in DC comics’ history, all the art for the series was by veteran illustrator Joe Certa (1919-1986), who had previously worked for the Funnies Incorporated comics “Shop”. His credits included work on Captain Marvel Junior and assorted genre titles for Magazine Enterprises (Dan’l Boone, Durango Kid), Lev Gleason’s crime comics and Harvey romance titles. For DC he drew nautical sleuth Captain Compass and many anthological tales for such titles as Gang Busters and House of Mystery.

Certa also drew the newspaper strip Straight Arrow and ghosted long-lived boxing strip Joe Palooka. In the 1970s he moved to Gold Key, working on TV adaptations, mystery tales and all-ages horror stories.

At the height of global Flying Saucer fever John Jones, Manhunter from Mars debuted in Detective Comics #225 (cover-dated November 1955). Written by Joe Samachson, ‘The Strange Experiment of Dr. Erdel’ describes how a reclusive genius builds a robot-brain able to access Time, Space and the Fourth Dimension, and accidentally plucks an alien scientist from his home on Mars. After a brief conversation with his unfortunate guest, Erdel succumbs to a heart attack whilst attempting to return the incredible J’onn J’onzz to his point of origin.

Marooned on Earth, the Martian realises his new home is riddled with the primitive cancer of Crime and determines to use his natural abilities (which include telepathy, mind-over-matter psychokinesis, shape-shifting, invisibility, intangibility, super-strength, speed, flight, vision, invulnerability and many others) to eradicate the blight, working clandestinely disguised as a human policeman. His only concern is the commonplace chemical reaction of fire which saps Martians of all their mighty powers…

With his name Americanised to John Jones he enlists as a Police Detective and, with #226’s ‘The Case of the Magic Baseball’ began a long and peril-fraught career tackling a variety of Earthly thugs and mobsters, starting with the sordid case of Big Bob Michaels – a reformed ex-con and baseball player blackmailed into throwing games by a gang of crooked gamblers. He continues in ‘The Man with 20 Lives’ where the mind-reading cop impersonates a ghost to force a confession from a hard-bitten killer.

The tantalising prospect of a return to Mars confronts Jones in the Dave Wood scripted ‘Escape to the Stars’ (Detective #228) wherein criminal scientist Alex Dunster cracks the secret of Erdel’s Robot Brain. However, duty overrules selfish desire and the mastermind destroys his stolen super-machine when Jones arrests him…

With issue #229 Jack Miller took over as series writer, leading off with ‘The Phantom Bodyguard’ as the Hidden Hero signs on to protect a businessman from his murderous partner only to discover a far more complex plot unfolding, before #230’s ‘The Sleuth Without a Clue’ finds the covert cop battling a deadline to get the goods on a vicious gang, just as a wandering comet causes his powers to malfunction…

Detective Comics #231 heralds the series’ shift towards its sci fi roots in ‘The Thief who had Super Powers!’, as an impossible bandit proves to be simply another refugee from the Fourth Planet, after which ‘The Dog with a Martian Master’ is revealed to be just another delightful if fanciful animal champion. Jones returns to straight crime-busting and clandestine cops and robbers capers by becoming ‘The Ghost from Outer Space’ in #233 and goes undercover in a prison to thwart a smart operator in #234’s ‘The Martian Convict’.

He infiltrates a circus as ‘The World’s Greatest Magician’ to catch a Phantom Thief and finally re-establishes contact with his extraterrestrial family to solve ‘The Great Earth-Mars Mystery’ in #236 before seeing out 1956 as ‘The Sleuth Who went to Jail’ – this time one operated by crooks – and loses his powers to work as an ‘Earth Detective for a Day’ in #238.

For Detective #239 (January 1957) ‘Ordeal By Fire!’ finds the Anonymous Avenger transferred to the Fire Department to track down an arson ring, whilst in ‘The Hero Maker’ Jones surreptitiously uses his powers to help a retiring cop go out on a high before yet another firebug targeting historical treasures sparks ‘The Impossible Manhunt’ in #241.

Jones thought he’d be safe as a underwater officer in ‘The Thirty Fathom Sleuth’ but even there flames find a way to menace him, after which he battles legendary Martian robot Tor in #243’s ‘The Criminal from Outer Space’ before doubling for an endangered actor in ‘The Four Stunts of Doom’ and busting up a clever racket utilising ‘The Phantom Fire Alarms’ in #245.

As a back-up feature, expectations were never particularly high but occasionally all the formula elements gelled to produce exemplary and even superb adventure tales such as #246’s ‘John Jones’ Female Nemesis’ which introduced pert, perky and pestiferous trainee policewoman Diane Meade. Being a 1950’s woman, naturally she had romance in mind, but was absent for the next equally engaging thriller wherein our indomitable alien cop puzzled over ‘The Impossible Messages’ of scurrilous smugglers and the marvellous tales of ‘The Martian Without a Memory’ in #248. Struck by lightning, Jones had to utilise human deductive skills to discern his lost identity, but almost exposed his own extraterrestrial secret in the process…

In Detective #249’s ‘Target for a Day’ the Martian disguises himself as the State Governor marked for death by a brutal gang whilst as ‘The Stymied Sleuth!’ in #250 he is forced to stay in hospital to protect his alien identity as radium thieves run amok in town, after which he seemingly becomes a brilliant crook himself… ‘Alias Mr. Zero’.

Issue #252 saw Jones confront a scientific super-criminal in ‘The Menace of the Super-Weapons’ before infiltrating a highly suspicious newspaper as ‘The Super Reporter!’ and invisibly battle rogue soldiers as ‘The One-Man Army’ in #254.

The Hidden Hero attempts to foil an audacious murder-plot encompassing the four corners of Earth in the ‘World-Wide Manhunt!’, after which #256’s ‘The Carnival of Doom’ pits him against canny crooks whilst babysitting a VIP kid before #257 sees the Starborn Sleuth perpetrating spectacular crimes to trap the ‘King of the Underworld!’

In Detective #258 Jones takes an unexpectedly dangerous vacation cruise on ‘The Jinxed Ship’ and return to tackle another criminal genius in ‘The Getaway King’ before helping a desolate and failing fellow cop in the heart-warming tale of ‘John Jones’ Super-Secret’, after which a shrink ray reduces him to ‘The Midget Manhunter!’ in #261.

It was an era of ubiquitous evil masterminds and another one used beasts for banditry in ‘The Animal Crime Kingdom’, whilst a sinister stage magician tested the Manhunter’s mettle and wits in #263’s ‘The Crime Conjurer!’ before the hero’s hidden powers are almost exposed after cheap hoods find a crashed capsule and unleash ‘The Menace of the Martian Weapons!’

Masked and costumed villains were still a rarity when J’onzz tackled ‘The Fantastic Human Falcon’ in #265 whilst ‘The Challenge of the Masked Avenger’ was the only case for a new – and inept – wannabe hero, after which the Martian’s sense of duty and justice force him to forego a chance to return home in #267’s ‘John Jones’ Farewell to Earth’…

A menacing fallen meteor results in ‘The Mixed-Up Martian Powers’ and a blackmailing reporter almost becomes ‘The Man who Exposed John Jones’, after which a trip escorting an extradited felon from Africa results in J’onzz becoming ‘The Hunted Martian’.

The Manhunter’s origin was revisited in #271 when Erdel’s robot-brain accidentally froze the alien’s powers in ‘The Lost Identity’ before death threats compel Jones’ boss to appoint a well-meaning hindrance in the form of ‘The Super-Sleuth’s Bodyguard’…

By the time Detective Comics #273 was released (November 1959) the Silver Age superhero revival was in full swing and, with a plethora of new costumed characters catching the public imagination, old survivors and hardy perennials like Green Arrow, Aquaman and others were given a thorough makeover. Perhaps the boldest was the new direction taken by the Manhunter from Mars as his undercover existence on Earth was revealed to all mankind as he very publicly battles and defeats a criminal from his home world in ‘The Unmasking of J’onn J’onzz’.

As part of the revamp, J’onzz lost the ability to use his powers whilst invisible and became a very high-profile superhero. At least his vulnerability to common flame was still a closely guarded secret…

This tale was followed by the debut of incendiary villain ‘The Human Flame’ in #274 and the introduction of a secret-identity-hunting romantic interest as policewoman Diane Meade returned in ‘John Jones’ Pesky Partner’ in #275.

‘The Crimes of John Jones’ finds the new superhero an amnesiac pawn of mere bank robbers before another fantastic foe debuted in #277 with ‘The Menace of Mr. Moth’. Invading Venusians almost cause ‘The Defeat of J’onn J’onzz’ next, and a hapless millionaire inventor nearly wrecks the city by accident with ‘The Impossible Inventions’…

Advance word of an underworld plot makes the Manhunter ‘Bodyguard to a Bandit’ to keep a crook out of prison, whilst #281’s ‘The Menace of Marsville’ inadvertently grants criminals powers to equal his before another fallen meteorite temporarily turns Diane into ‘The Girl with the Martian Powers’ – or does it…?

To help out an imperilled ship captain, J’onzz becomes ‘The Amazing One-Man Crew’ whilst in #284 Diane – unaware of his extraterrestrial origins – tries to seduce her partner in ‘The Courtship of J’onn J’onzz’ after which monster apes tear up the city in ‘The Menace of the Martian Mandrills!’

Detective #286 sees ‘His Majesty, John Jones’ stand in for an endangered Prince in a take on The Prisoner of Zenda before ‘J’onn J’onzz’s Kid Brother’ T’omm is briefly stranded on Earth. Only one of the siblings could return…

‘The Case of the Honest Swindler’ in #288 features a well-meaning man accidentally endangering the populace with magical artefacts after which a quick trip to Asia pits the Martian against a cunning jungle conman in ‘J’onn J’onzz – Witch Doctor’.

When a movie is repeatedly sabotaged Diane assumes the job of lead stunt-girl with some assistance from the Manhunter in ‘Lights, Camera – and Doom!’ after which a lovesick suitor masquerades as ‘The Second Martian Manhunter’ to win his bride in #291 before ‘The Ex-Convicts Club’ almost founders before it begins when someone impersonates the reformed criminals to pulling new jobs. Luckily J’onzz is more trusting than most…

When Diane finds herself with a rival in policewoman Sally Winters their enmity can apparently only be resolved with ‘The Girl-Hero Contest’ after which the Manhunter pursues crooks into another dimension and is rendered ‘The Martian Weakling’ (in #294), thereafter becoming ‘The Martian Show-Off’ to inexplicably deprive a fellow cop of his 1000th arrest… When that mystery is solved, he acts as ‘The Alien Bodyguard’ for Diane who is blithely unaware that she has been marked for death…

In #297’s ‘J’onn J’onzz vs. the Vigilantes’, the Green Guardian exposes the secret agenda of a committee of wealthy “concerned citizens” before going to the aid of a stage performer who is ‘The Man Who Impersonated J’onn J’onzz!’ He then almost fails as a ‘Bodyguard for a Spy’ because Diane is jealous of the beautiful Princess in his charge…

Detective #300 unveiled ‘The J’onn J’onzz Museum’ – a canny ploy by a master criminal who believes he has uncovered the Martian’s secret weakness, whilst ‘The Mystery of the Martian Marauders’ sees the hero battling impossible odds when an army of his fellows invaded Earth…

‘The Crime King of Mount Olympus’ matches the Manhunter against a pantheon of Hellenic super-criminals to save Diane’s life after which more plebeian thugs attempt to expose his secret identity in ‘The Great J’onn J’onzz Hunt’…

This first beguiling compendium then concludes with #304’s stirring tale of an academy of scientific lawbreaking when John Jones infiltrates ‘The Crime College’…

Although certainly dated, these complex yet uncomplicated adventures are drenched in charm and still sparkle with innocent wit and wonder. Perhaps not to everyone’s taste nowadays, these exploits of the Manhunter from Mars are still an all-ages buffet of fun, thrills and action no fan should miss.
© 1953, 1955-1962, 2007 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.