Comix

The cover showing off Flare’s best assets promises exactly what you will get inside. If you liked Wonder Woman or Black Canary but hated how conservatively they dressed, Flare is the genetically engineered raised by Nazis in the Brazilian rainforest superheroine for you.

Flare Adventures was a low price reprint series of the first Flare series, the first issue reprinting the first story from the original. In it, Flare is woken up by a phone call from her friend who wants her to come down, quickly puts on a way too short dressing gown and promptly flashes the photographers her friend had assembled for the press conference Flare had totally forgotten about. After that, she does some work as a photo model, then has to fight a bank robbing villain called Darkon and is promptly beaten by his darkness powers. It’s a pretty good sampler for the rest of Flare’s adventures. If you read them for anything but the cheesecake, they’re mildly underwhelming.

But I didn’t know that when I bought this. It was 1992 and all I saw was another superhero when I bought this together with the similar Champions Classics, reprinting one of Heroic other old titles. They’d gotten George Pérez to do the cover for that one which lured me in, just as the Tim Burchard cover had done for Flare Adventures. Together they were my first introduction to the whole Heroic universe and honestly the covers were the best part of them. As I read more Flare stories when I came across them I realised that in general, the artwork was always a cut above the writing which never rose above ‘serviceable’.

To understand why that is you have to understand that Heroic Publishing and the Flare/Champions universe are largely the rpoduct of one man, Dennis Mallonee. He’s the writer for most of these comics as well as their publisher. Yet ironically, he didn’t create Flare or the Champions: those came from a role playing game also called Champions. That had been first released in 1981 as one of the first superhero RPGs and also one of the first not to use dice rolls but a point distribution system: you could decide for yourself what your character’s strengths and weaknesses were. As people started playing that, they of course created their own heroes and some of these, via ‘official’ RPG sessions were included as examples in new editions of Champions. Then, when during the ’85 Comic Con fans of the game asked if there would ever be a comic version, Mallonee decided he would do it. That led to the first Champions miniseries, published by Eclipse in 1986, which wasn’t quite what he wanted.

Mallonee was already a publisher, having published the Fantasy Book prose magazine and he decided he would go into comics to publish his stories the way he intended. Heroic Publishing started off in 1987 with three series: champions, another Mallonee series called Eternity Smith that had started at Renegade Press and the Roy & Dann Thomas written Captain Thumder & Blue Bolt. Flare would arrive the year after, having been voted the most popular member of the Champions by the readers of that first Eclipse series. She quickly became the poster girl for Heroic as a whole, starring in various titles, always written by Mallonee and drawn by various artists you may have heard of: Mark Beachum, Chriss Marrinan, e. R. Cruz, Howard Simpson.

Originally created by Stacy Thain for that original Champions RPG, Mallonee fleshed out her background, making her the product of Nazi super science as well as offspring of the Olympian gods. She got a younger sister with similar powers who unlike her completely bought into Nazi ideology, who would later also join the Champions team. Because I could find none of these titles with any regularity in the comic shop and also because Heroic had a habit of stop starting series and introducing new ones that mixed reprints of older material with newer stories, getting a handle on who Flare actually was was always difficult to me. Rereading some of this now it’s clear though that there just isn’t that much going on with her. At best these stories are store brand superhero stories, the characters no more compelling than somebody else’s RPG character always is, at worst they’re just excuse for Flare or another heroine to fall out of her top. Because it’s always Mallonee writing them, these stories and characters all blend together; Flare doesn’t feel that different from her sister or from another heroine like Arcane.

Nevertheless, Flare and Heroic Publishing are still around, now doing print on demand and Kickstarter campaigns. Somebody still likes Heroic’s blend of cheesecake and superhero stories….

There are a few artists (Gulacy, Chaykin, Pérez e.g) for whom I’d buy a comic even if they only did a cover. Steranko too is such an artist, but that’s not why I wanted this particular issue.

I certainly didn’t buy it for the story, an Archie Goodwin/Roy Thomas yarn about a group of extradimensional exiles calling themselves the Others who with their psionic powers are drawing a planetoid unto Earth to release the energy needed to return to their home dimension. Nick Fury is no stranger to sci-fi plots but this was something you’d expect to see in Fantastic Four or Avengers. The artwork by Frank Springer is good. He has a decent eye for the sort of futuristic decor that this story needed while he’s no slouch at action scenes either. Springer’s very good at ratcheting up the tension as well, as Nick has only hours to save the Earth. The resolution is a bit obvious, but the way Goodwin and Thomas increasingly corner Fury as the story unfolds, as each of his attempts to stop the disaster is foiled, is great.

No, I couldn’t care less about the contents of this issue nor even for the fact that Steranko had drawn the cover. This was simply something I purchased for nostalgic reasons. I knew that cover, had seen and admired it long before I ever laid my hands on the issue it was used on. It was all thanks to the first, 1979 edition of John Clute and Peter Nicholl’s Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which unlike the second 1991 edition was illustrated. And one of these illustrations was this particular Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD cover.

I must’ve read every word of the encyclopedia after I had discovered it in my local library. I borrowed it for months at the time, just rereading it and learning about science fiction when I didn’t have the pocket money to regularly buy science fiction books myself. And every time I browsed through it, I would come across this picture and had to stop to admire it for a second. Of course then I bought the actual issue it was from the moment I spotted it at a convention. It turns out I wasn’t the only one enthralled by this cover either: it won an Ally Award in 1968 for Best Cover.

You’ll never forget your first prog as a 2000 AD reader and this one was mine.

I’ve talked about 2000 AD before recently, but I thought I would mention this particular prog as this was my first ever. A good start it was too, because it did periodically the magazine had reinvented itself again with a little bit of a makeover (and a price hike, natch) and all new stories. A perfect jump on point for new readers like me.It certainly hooked me enough to keep buying 2000 AD for over a hundred progs.

The lead Judge Dredd story was the first of a two part John Wagner/Ron Smith follow-up to the Necropolis saga that had ended the previous issue, with Dredd investigating a disused holo theatre for a sign of Judge Death. To be honest it, together with the Pat Mills/C. Critchlow Nemesis and Deadlock story, is the weakest story in here. Both are more palate cleansers, just there to mark time between more substantial stories.

Much more interesting is Time Flies, which will run for 11 progs, a Garth Ennis and Philip Bond time travel comedy in which squadron leader Bertie Sharp is plucked out of time by a group of time travelers from the 35th century (and the Bros brothers) to help rescue Hermann Goering from a band of time pirates so that Adolf Hitler can get them spare parts for their own time machine. It’s a slightly overcooked zany adventure and Ennis’ first 2000 AD story.

Even zanier is Hewligan’s Haircut, by Pete Milligan and Jamie Hewlett, about the unfortunate Hewligan, a patient on a psychiatric ward who managed to cut a perfect hole in his hair that looked the same from all angles and which slightly upset all laws of physics and reality itself. For all of its zaniness it’s a story that worked rather well, more interesting than the Ennis attempt.

Rounding off the issue is the first in Psi Judge Anderson story by Alan Grant and Arthur Ranson, whose art is just gorgeous. None of the artists in this issue are bad, but his is just on another level. Shamballa is a psychic adventure in which Anderson teams up with a Sov Bloc Judge as various psionic breakouts around the world spell out that the end times are near. A far more serious to end on.

As a whole, for somebody who had only read some Judge Dredd and was only vaguely aware of other 2000 AD this was a good start even if two out of the five stories were middling. There was enough there that was completely new to me that I looked forward to the next issue.

This cover caption has lived rent free in my heads for decades. You’re a kid… You’re flying a Shogun… And it’s really fun…. RIGHT? WRONG!

The local comic shop in my hometown started stocking American back issues sometime in the late eighties and every Wednesday I would go there and browse through to see what caught my eye. Shogun Warriors 17 was one of those. Not just one of the first American comics I ever bought, it may very well have been the very first mecha story I ever read.

Because that’s what Shogun Warriors was, a comic book based on a toy line that took the lead mecha from three different anime (Wakusei Robo Danguard Ace), Brave Raideen and Chōdenji Robo Combattler V) in an attempt to sell them to American children. Marvel was asked to create the comic as an advert for the toys and with only the toys as a reference, writer Doug Moench and artist Herb Trimpe invented a whole new story to go along with them, Trimpe also inventing the monsters the Shogun Warriors would fight. Nothing was carried over from the original stories these mecha appeared in; this isn’t even a Macross/Robotech situation.

What Moench and Trimpe invented was a story of a long ago war between the Followers of Light and the Followers of Dark, which the latter lost and after which they were sealed in a volcano. When its eruption threatened to revive the evil Follower of Dark Maur-Kon, a neat multinational three person squadron was formed to combat them, each given their own giant robot. Stuntman Richard Carson got Raydeen, test pilot Genji Odashu got Combatra and oceanographer Ilongo Savage got Dangard Ace, the coolest of the three. I’m not sure how much Moench and Trimpe knew about mecha anime or super sentai live action series, but the series sure reads like one, with the Warriors having to fight a series of monsters sent their way by Maur-Kon.

Shogun Warriors was created in 1978, at a time when Marvel did a lot of titles based on licensed properties and usually stuck them somewhere in the Marvel Universe. Moench and Trimpe had already done that with Godzilla before, while Micronauts, Rom, The Human Fly and Team America were launched at roughly the same time or slightly later. You could even argue that it all started with Conan the Barbarian: not explicitly set in the Marvel Universe at first, but once he got his first team-up with Spider-Man…

Shogun Warriors greatest contribution to the Marvel Universe was Doctor Demonicus, a super genetic engineer making giant monsters out of mutated animals. He would later pop up in Roy and Dann Thomas’s Avengers West Coast as a major villain. The final two issues of the series had the Fantastic Four as guest stars and the Warriors would return the favour in a later issue of Fantastic Four in which the robots were destroyed to tie off all the loose ends from the series.

Issue 17 though is a simple story of a young boy who discovers Combatra having been hidden in an abandoned building in San Francisco and accidentally triggers the mechanism that transports him into the cockpit. Not knowing how to operate it, the poor kid is along for the ride as Combatra goes on a rampage and Raydeen has to stop him… The cover was probably more exciting than the actual story, but it hardly mattered at the time.

Luc Orient and pals are brought to the planet Terango to dispose of its tyrant before he can invade the Earth!

From one of my favourite childhood sf series to another: Luc Orient. Another series I first read in my local library and this particular story was one of the first I can remember reading of it. Written by Greg, who seemed to have written almost every series published in Tintin between 1957 and 1993 or so. The art is by Eddy Paape, another Belgian comics veteran but who had mainly worked for Tintin rival Spirou before Luc Orient.

Luc Orient‘s titular protagonist is a blonde, brawny troubleshooter for Eurocristal, a fictional super science organisation. His best friend is professor Hugo Kala, leader of the lab and his girl Friday is Lora, who luckily does more than just playing the damsel in distress. Together they go on various science fictional adventures and managed to do so for some 18 albums, the first published in 1969, the last coming out in 1994.

What set Luc Orient apart from similar series is its remarkable use of continuity. European heroes tend to have their adventures in neat, 48 page album sized chunks, each a standalone story. Unlike American superhero stories continuing subplots are rare nor is there even the illusion of change most of the time. Tintin kept running around in his plus fours from 1929 to 1976 and the only thing that changed were the types of cars and air planes he used after all. But Luc Orient was different, as the first five stories did have a continuous plot.

In the first two albums, Luc Orient and co are on an expedition to Borneo to investigate the mysterious valley of the three suns, were ultimately they discover a crashed spaceship with a cargo of aliens in cryosleep onboard. After saving them in the second album, this story sees them return to Earth to call on Luc Orient to help them save their planet from its oppressor, the tyrant Sectan. The two volumes after that tell the story of how they managed to do so, after having struck the first blow in this one.

As a young boy reading this somewhere in the late seventies/early eighties, some of the very first science fiction I ever read this was mind altering. Especially the way Paape depicted Terango, this alien planet. Having discovered Isaac Asimov and his vision of a planet wide super city, the way Paape depicted Terangopolis is how I imagined Asimov’s Trantor would look like.