An attempted coup by barbarian invaders crash lands an artificial mini planet on Earth, 250 million years BC in this mixture of Von Daniken and Star Wars.
Yesterday’s entry reminded me of another 1979 science fiction series with an artificial world traveling the galaxy and a Spanish artist. this time though the journey is involuntary and takes place “250 000 centuries ago”. On Axi, war and violence have been eradicated centuries ago. But then the barbarian Zorks under their evil leader Zorka attacked, were promptly defeated by the Axi defence shields and captured. Turned over for rehabilitation by professor Orloz, they are transported to Thulia, a giant artificial planet in orbit around Axi. But what Orloz and his assistants Rodion (the hero) and Lilya (the girl sidekick) do not realise is the enormity of Zorka’s thirst for power. He quickly gets hold of some antique laser weapons from a museum and forces Orloz to hand over control of Thulia by threatening to murder its inhabitants. Unfortunately during the ensuing fight the control systems get damaged, Thulia leaves orbit and drifts helplessly into the Galaxy only to end up on Earth at the end of the first story.
All of which sets the stage for the adventurs of Rodion, Lilya and prof Orloz on what’s clearly a Jurassic Era Earth considering the presence of brontosauruses, despite the fact that is supposedly 250 million years ago and that era only started 200 million years ago, but who cares eh?
Certainly Roger Lecureux didn’t when he wrote this, considering one of the later stories featured the threat of a Phorushacos, a flightless bird from the Mycene, long after the dinosaurs went extinct. We’re on “prehistoric Earth”, not an entirely new setting for Lecureux, whose much better known Rahan was also set there, but in a more scientific rigorous one. Here all the setting is there for is to provide monstrous menaces for our heroes to overcome in their flight to freedom from the tyranny of Zorka.
With Alfonso Font on art duty, these monster fights at the very least look good. Font is equally adept at drawing realistic, lived in looking high tech space ships and cities as he is at drawing prehistoric animals while not neglecting his characters either. I’ve always liked his art style and De Bannelingen van de Aarde was the first time I saw his art. The title of the series roughly translates as “the Exiles on Earth”; in Dutch three albums were published in 1980-1981. As far as I know, to little success.
The series was originally published in France as Les Robinsons de la Terre, in the weekly comics magazine Pif Gadget for a total of twenty two episodes of usually ten pages. The Dutch version was incomplete, stopping halfway through and at a cliffhanger. (Interesting to note is that Pif Gadget started off as Vaillant, a magazine for the communist youth movement in 1945). In France the series wasn’t successful either, with only one album collection published in 1980.
I can understand why. The stories are competent, but formulaic and while the art is great it’s not sufficient to make this a series you got to read. It’s entertaining but nothing more than that, a minor work in the oeuvre of both Lecureux and Font.
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