Gigantik 01 — #aComciaDay (53)

If you want to boldly go where no one has gone before, seeking out new worlds and new civilisations, why use a poxy space ship when you can take an entire planet, asks Gigantik?

A robot is menacing our hero, who has his blaster in his hand. A red haired girl is lying next to him, clinging to his leg. On the monitor in the background a planet surrounded by an air shield and two artificial moons is visible

This is something that you can really only do in comics, just use an entire planet to explore the Galaxy with. Blew my mind reading these as a child, the idea of exploring the universe while still enjoying all the comforts of home. José Maria Cardona’s art, whose style is not dissimilar to Alfonso Font’s here, helped a lot with this. He made Gigantik look very attractive indeed, portraying it as a combination of research center, holiday resort and nature park.

The series was set a century from its first publication, 2078, when the Solar System had been completely explored and several planets had been settled as well. Space travel is common and easy enough that a trip from Mars to Earth only takes a few days and space piracy is actually possible. Which is what drives the plot for this first Gigantik story, as astrobiologist Bruno Castor — who had been stufying the native Martian wildlife — prepares to join the Gigantik expedition in place of his brother, who died in a space accident. The Claw, one of the most infamous space pirates, wants to use Bruno to infiltrate the project and take it over to become the ruler of the Solar System. To that end he kidnaps Bruno and Mireilla Anderson, the grand daughter of the leader of Gigantik’s scientific council, to blacvkmail the latter into handing over the planet. Bruno and Mireilla, with the help of their trusty robot sidekicks Bulldozer and Peanut, however manage to foil his plans.

Yes, there is a fair bit of Star Wars inspiration in here, not the least with the bickering robot sidekicks, but the Claw too is a sort of K-Mart special Darth Vader. Probably inevitable as this series was conceived in 1978/79. Gigantik was created by Victor Mora, Spanish like the artist José Maria Cardona, for the West-German comics magazine Zack which at that time had ambitions to become a pan-European magazine. For a short while in 1979-1980 it would be also published in Dutch as Wham! and in French as Super-As. Printing the same magazine in multiple languages can be cheaper than in just one; to swap language you apparently just have to swap the black printing plates; the other colours can remain the same and higher print runs means cheaper printing costs. With Zack having gotten its hands on both new series by established authors as well as several older fan favourites taken over from other magazines you’d think it could’ve done well, but sadly the whole venture lasted only a year.

Gigantik outlived the magazine: seven albums were published in Dutch, from 1979 to 1984. In retrospect Gigantik is a minor classic of what you might call the “Spanish School” of science fiction comics. Victor Mora of course was also the writer of Dani Futuro.

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