Reviews: Faker, The Highwaymen, Welcome to Tranquility

Faker issue 1 by Mike Carey (writer), Jock (artist), Clem Robins (letterer), Lee Loughridge (colourist) and Shelly Bond (editor), 24 pages of strip, DC Comics/Vertigo, September 2007, US$2.99

A group of students at Minnesota University get drunk in a cybernetics-cum-biological laboratory and wake up with identity problems.

Oh dear, this is a mess. It’s most obvious problem is that all the characters are deeply unpleasant, most notably the narrator, who has seduced her professor with the intention of blackmailing him. This nastiness is not offset by any wit or compelling characterisation. The storytelling is confusing. Without the blurb, I wouldn’t really have known what was going on – not in the sense that there’s a mystery, but in the sense that the narrative is badly constructed. There are pages of decompressed pacing used for no readily apparent reason. Key transitions are missed: how did they get into that laboratory, for example?

Jock is usually a reliable artist with a good sense of composition and mood, but his ragged, jagged artwork makes all the characters look to be in their thirties at least.


“Everyone has something to hide,” reads the cover blurb. Well, don’t worry. I won’t come looking.


The Highwaymen issue 1 “Sick & Retired” by Marc Bernadin and Adam Freeman (writers), Lee Garbett (penciller), Jonny Rench (colourist), Rob Leigh (letterer) and Scott Peterson (editor), cover by Brian Stelfreeze, 22 pages of strip, DC Comics/Wildstorm, August 2007, US$2.99

In 2021, two elderly ex-secret agents are called out of retirement by a message from the late President Bill Clinton, and find themselves in opposition to the current CIA.

This reads so much like an illustrated pitch for a summer action blockbuster buddy-movie that I was surprised to find that it was published by Wildstorm rather than by Boom! Studios. The big action sequence this issue has our heroes on a bus full of old folks being chased by several car loads of CIA agents. It’s well enough done, with some amusing dialogue from the elderly passengers in particular, but I don’t think comics is a medium as well suited to this sort of thing as film is.


Artists Garbett and Rench have a strong Frank Quitely influence, which is surprisingly rare, when you consider how long Quitely has been a critics’ favourite.

Worth a look if you’re on a Live Free or Die Hard kick and want something similar in comics form, but not compelling.


Welcome to Tranquility issue 8, written by Gail Simone, colours by Carrie Strachan, letters by Lanham and Pat Brosseau, edited by Abernathy and Quinn, cover by Neil Googe, 22 pages of strip, DC Comics/Wildstorm, September 2007, US$2.99
features: introductory page with art by Neil Googe
The Ferocious Lindo Sisters “What You Really Want!”, art by Jason Pearson
Zombie Zeke “Dead End Highway”, art by Chriscross
The Emoticon “Not My Type”, art by Georges Jeanty (penciller) and Peter Guzman (inker)

Presumably an interlude between story arcs to allow Neil Googe to keep up with his schedule, this issue is drawn by a fine assortment of artists with an approach sympathetic to his. We get the origin stories of Zombie Zeke, the Crypt-Keeper type who looks after the Tranquility cemetery, and of small-time super-villain the Emoticon, as well as some formative events in the youth of Sheriff Thomasina Lindo. Each story is a neat little vignette in its own right, and each links with the others in minor but effective ways.


This is a fill-in issue in more ways than one: it gives the regular artist a break, but allows Simone to fill in more of Tranquility’s background, adding depth to her fictional setting. It’s an interesting, and, I think, more successful, contrast to the recent issue of The Spirit which also featured three stories by guest artists (and writers), but which seemed entirely separate from the ongoing series.

Blogging in Ignorance: The Girl from UNCLE

I don’t think that I ever saw The Girl from UNCLE on TV.

I never read any of the five comics published in the USA by (who else?) Gold Key.


I never read any of the three annuals published in the UK by World Distributors.


The only Girl from UNCLE story that I know is a comic strip in a Lady Penelope annual.

So why mention it?

First, because it provides such a stark demonstration of the difficulties that I mentioned earlier faced by artists trying to draw TV-tie-in comics with limited photo-reference. Here, the same photograph of Leo G Carroll, who played UNCLE boss Mr Waverly, is used at the beginning and end of the story, only six pages apart. Note, too, that Waverly looks nothing like Carroll in the penultimate panel, drawn without reference.


(Nor does April Dancer look much like actress Stephanie Powers either here or elsewhere.)

Second, this story was drawn by Enric Badia Romero, who would later become the regular artist on Modesty Blaise, the comic strip which kicked off this little thread about action heroines of the 1960s. And if Romero can finish where he started, so can I.


Pictures and panels
The Girl from UNCLE issue 2, Gold Key, April 1967

The Girl from UNCLE “Academy of THRUSH Agents”, art by Enric Badia Romero, Lady Penelope Annual, City Magazines, 1967

The Girl from UNCLE Annual 1968, World Distributors, 1967

Wooden Wonder: Lady Penelope

In the days before viral marketing and massive promotion budgets, one of the ways in which puppet science fiction producer Gerry Anderson tried to raise advance interest in his upcoming television series was through comics. When TV Century 21 was launched in 1965, alongside the familiar Anderson series Fireball XL5 and Stingray, and other TV stalwarts The Daleks and Burke’s Law (the detective series in which Anne Francis made her first appearance as Honey West) was what must have seemed a mystery – the futuristic adventures of aristocrat, journalist and spy, Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward.

A few months later, Thunderbirds appeared on television, and it all made sense. The puppet Lady Penelope went on to become one of Britain’s strangest ever sex symbols, which is saying something in a country that has produced such grotesques as Victoria Beckham and Jordan (though at least Lady Penelope was constructed mostly from natural materials).

If the producers of programmes like The Champions were restricted in the action sequences they could put on screen, how much more so was Gerry Anderson, his leading characters unable even to walk across a room convincingly, let alone run or jump or fight.

The Lady Penelope comic strip often reflected, rather than challenged, those restrictions, but this played well with Lady Penelope’s air of imperturbability.


Indeed, on those occasions when Penny behaved in a more physically aggressive manner, it seemed somehow undignified.


The Lady Penelope comic strip was successful enough for it to lead a spin-off comic of the same name in 1966, with the tag line “For Girls Who Love Television”. The Lady Penelope comic was to be the home of another strip intended to trail a new television series, in this case telling of the formation of the Angels fighter squadron that would appear in Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.


At the same time, a series called The Mark of the Mysterons began in the boys’ comic Solo. The structure of the media of the day – only three UK television channels but as many comics as the market would bear – meant that girls and boys were expected to read different comics but to watch the same television programmes.

Sadly, the Gerry Anderson comic empire didn’t last. A third title, Joe 90 Top Secret was launched, but soon folded into TV21, which in turn, its Anderson-based strips already poached by another publisher, was swallowed up by Valiant. (In those days, a failing comic in Britain was not cancelled, but merged with another title, and the print runs and subscriptions added together to make the new combined comic more financially secure.) Lady Penelope was eventually transformed into Penelope, a more conventional girls’ comic with few links to its puppet past. So we never got solo adventures of Lieutenant Gay Ellis or Colonel Virginia Lake from UFO. A shame, that.

For more on the Lady Penelope comic strip, have a look at The Gerry Anderson Complete Comic History.


Panels
Lady Penelope “The Vanishing Ray”, art by Eric Eden, TV Century 21 issue 50, 1 January 1966, reprinted in Thunderbirds … Lift Off!, Ravette Books, 1992

Lady Penelope “Duel in the Jungle”, art by Enric Badia Romero, Lady Penelope Annual, Century 21 Publishing/City Magazines, 1968

The Angels, art by Jon Davis, The New Lady Penelope issue 55, 4 February 1967, reprinted in Action 21, issue 10, October 1989

Beyond Borehamwood: The Champions

Back to the ‘60s again.

The British television production company ITC, run by the flamboyant Lew Grade, had a big hit with its adaptation of Leslie Charteris’s stories of The Saint, starring Roger Moore. It spent the rest of the decade producing imitations about globetrotting adventurers (as well as financing Gerry Anderson’s puppet fantasies, but that’s another story). Danger Man, The Baron, Man in a Suitcase - all shared The Saint’s conviction that there was no country in the world that could not be replicated by stock footage, the parkland around Borehamwood studios, and a population of British character actors.

In 1968, The Champions stretched ITC’s resources further, by endowing its lead characters with super-powers. Craig Sterling, Richard Barrett and Sharron MacReady, agents of the international secret police organisation Nemesis, crashed their plane in the Himalayas, and were rebuilt by the inhabitants of a hidden city. Unfortunately, although their powers supposedly included super-strength, there was little more money in the budget for stunts and special effects than for foreign travel, so the stories tended to rely on such less visually interesting powers as super-hearing and telepathy instead. What feats and fights as we saw were largely hogged by Sterling and Barrett, either because of assumptions about gender roles, or because of the shortage of stunt women to double for lead actress Alexandra Bastedo.

The comics faced no such constraints.



Sadly, comics adaptations didn’t always take this sort of opportunity. The later ITC television series Department S involved a team assembled by Interpol to solve unsolveable crimes. It consisted of dogged investigator Stewart Sullivan, wild theorist (and novelist) Jason King, and rational researcher and computer expert Annabelle Hirst. Although Jason King was clearly the stand-out character, and eventually got his own spin-off series, the three principals treated each other as equals, and needled each other constantly.

Which is why the disappointment of the only comic strip adaptation of Department S that I have seen lies not just in Annabelle’s demotion to secretary, but in her deference to the menfolk.


Win one, lose one. But the win has that lovely sleek shiny artwork by Ron Turner, so I’ll read that one more often.

Panels
The Champions “Error of Judgement”, art by Ron Turner, Joe 90 Top Secret Comic Annual, Century 21 Publishing/City Magazines, 1969

Department S “The Silent Men”, writer and artist unidentified, Thunderbirds Annual 1971, City Magazines, 1971

Review: The Final Flight

The Final Flight created and illustrated by Romain Hugault, story and dialogue by Romain Hugault and Régis Hautière, translated by Erik Svane, 45 pages of strip, US$10, Editions Paquet

This small album was a pleasant surprise when I found it on the shelves of Forbidden Planet in Newcastle. I don’t think I had seen it advertised anywhere. Paquet has only four English language books in print or in preparation.

The Final Flight tells the story of four flights in the Second World War by four pilots, one Japanese, one American, one German, and one a French volunteer for the Soviet Union. Each pilot is depicted sympathetically. Each story gives a different perspective on the wartime experience of pilots, as the four lives intersect and intertwine.

The sumptuous artwork of Romain Hugault lends elegance to the overall tone of fatalism in the story. And if I have a complaint, it is that everything here looks too beautiful. In real life, the injuries suffered by aircrew in the Battle of Britain were so hideous that they prompted the creation of modern plastic surgery. But in The Final Flight, death occurs in suddden explosions, and injuries are limited and easily hidden by a few clean white dressings. The lives depicted here are tragic, but never ugly – which may be Hugault’s point, as he stresses the human dignity of his characters.


This isn’t a particularly ambitious tale, but it is quietly effective, and affecting, in its own way.

Not in Previews

The latest issue of Previews includes a relisting of the trade paperback collection of Albion, the underwhelming attempt by Leah Moore, John Reppion and Shane Oakley to launch the back catalogue of comics characters from British publishers Odhams, Fleetway and IPC onto the American market.

The blurb says, “Reoffered to coincide with Albion Origins, solicited in the Titan Books section of this Previews”.

No such volume appears in the Titan Books section, either in the US bit or in the Previews UK listings at the back. It looks like this volume of reprints – which John Reppion says will include Janus Stark, House of Dolmann, Cursitor Doom and Kelly's Eye - has been bumped down the schedule to make room for a collection of the Norwegian goth-girl humour strip Nemi. Ah, the indignities of age.

Update
Amazon has Brian Bolland's cover for Albion Origins, and gives a publication date of 16 October (though Amazon's listed publication dates often turn out to be wrong).

(Click to enlarge.)

Picture
Albion cover by Dave Gibbons, DC Comics/Wildstorm
Albion Origins cover by Brian Bolland, Titan Books

Reviews: Judge Dredd Megazine, Satana

Judge Dredd Megazine issue 260, edited by Matt Smith, cover art by Peter Doherty, 40 pages of strip, £2.99, Rebellion, 24 July 2007
Features Judge Dredd “Night School” by John Wagner (script) and Peter Doherty (art and letters)
Anderson, Psi Division “Big Robots” part 4 by Alan Grant (script), Dave Taylor (concept and art) and Ellie de Ville (letters)
Judge Dredd “Blood of Satanus III: The Tenth Circle” chapter 4 “Hungry Jacko” by Pat Mills (script), Hicklenton (art) and Simon Bowland (art)
Freak Show “The Quiet Man” by Robert Curley and Declan Shalvey
“The God Fish” by Mike Collins (script), Chris Weston (art) and Tom Frame (letters) (reprinted from 2000AD)
The Angel Gang “Before They Wuz Dead” part 3 by Simon Spurrier (script), Steve Roberts (art) and Ellie de Ville (letters)

The highlights of this issue are Dave Taylor’s cityscapes in “Big Robots” – a story about a mad architect whose city blocks are actually giant robots now going on a pre-programmed rampage – and Steve Roberts’ cartoonish but gritty artwork on The Angel Gang.


But all the Dredd material here feels a little tired, an impression reinforced by Pete Doherty’s competent but mundane artwork on “Night School”. I wish I could say it was inappropriate, but Wagner's story about Dredd getting his clone Dolman acquitted of a manslaughter charge is equally dull. Perhaps thirty years of mining the Judge Dredd background weekly in 2000AD and, latterly, in several stories a month in the Megazine, have left it played out?

“The God Fish” is a routine twist-ending Future Shock, distinguished only by Chris Weston’s artwork. Freak Show is a small press showcase story about a police entrapment operation, which shows that Curley and Shalvey have promise, but are still a little clumsy in pacing and dialogue.

But all of this is preferable to “Blood of Satanus”, a farrago of ugly, over-emphatic and sloppy writing and drawing by two long-established comics professionals.


Articles this issue lead with part 2 of a history of horror comics, this time concentrating on British comics, especially the horror-inflected material in 2000AD and US-published comics by UK creators from Swamp Thing to Gutsville. I found odd the statement that “2000AD had only one explicit horror serial” before Andy Diggle’s time as editor (Fiends of the Eastern Front). What about Shako (basically Jaws but with a polar bear), or the early story about an army of ants eating its way across South America?

There’s also an interview with Carl Critchlow, mostly about his work as writer/artist on Thrud the Barbarian; an article noting the latest wave of British comics writers and artists working in the US; a short piece advising small press creators on how to prepare for comics conventions; some film reviews; and the 27th part of an annotated index of the Judge Dredd stories in 2000AD. They’ve only reached Prog 277 (out of 1543 to date), but still haven’t found room to include any publication dates.

I don’t buy the Judge Dredd Megazine very often. This issue reminded me why.


Legion of Monsters: Satana issue 1, cover by Greg Land, 28 pages of strip, US$2.99, Marvel Comics, August 2007
Features Satana “Satana and the Electric Pentacle” by Robin Forth (writer), Kalman Andrasofszky (art), Stephane Pero (colour), VC’s Rus Wooton (letters) and John Barber (editor)
The Living Mummy “Must Die / Eat Soul” by Jonathan Hickman (story and art) and John Barber (editor)

Believe it or not, the character on the cover, the Devil’s daughter Satana, actually criticises someone else’s fashion sense in this issue, despite being dressed herself in Vampirella’s cast-offs. That apart, the lead story here, in which a woman learns that making a deal with Satan’s daughter can be a tricky business, is an OK time-passer. But the reason for buying this issue is in the back of the comic.

For The Living Mummy, Jonathan Hickman brings to bear on Egyptianate horror the informatic style he developed for modern media tale The Nightly News. Each page is a single illustrative unit (except for one integrated double-page spread), and the dialogue is interspersed with box-outs giving background information.


You might expect this approach to be too dry and modern to suit a historical horror story, but Hickman uses more a more decorative style here than in The Nightly News, and conjures up the heat of the Nile valley with his choices of brown and orange colours. It works surprisingly well. As the story is a basic origin retelling, the interest is all in this technique.

Reviews: Blue Beetle, Spider-Man Fairy Tales, The Spirit

Blue Beetle issue 16 “Total Eclipso: The Heart” by John Rogers (writer), Rafael Albuquerque (artist), Phil Balsman (letterer), Guy Major (colourist) and Joan Hilty (editor), cover by Cully Hamner, 22 pages of strip, US$2.99, DC Comics, August 2007

Under probably the worst punning title of the year, Rogers and Albuquerque tell a decent little superhero story. Villainous spirit Eclipso is trying to gain a new host by occupying a baby with no past experiences to act as weaknesses. She is opposed by sorceress Traci 13, who drags the Blue Beetle and his supporting cast into the fight.

Although this fits into events in DC’s current mess of interconnecting crossovers, the story is a standalone one: everything you need to know is within its pages. The only fact you might need from past DC continuity is that Eclipso’s current human host murdered Sue Dibny, wife of the Elongated Man, and that’s probably something you could infer from events. There is unselfish heroism – not just from the super-powered characters – teenage romance, banter and a handful of good jokes (especially the one about “the secret power fantasy of a teenager with an alien killing machine at his command” - Rachelle Goguen has the joke scanned if you still don't want to buy the issue). Albuquerque delivers a few jerky panel progressions, but has a particularly good command of subtle facial expressions.


This is a good, entertaining comic which relies on amusing characterisation and solid storytelling rather than shock tactics and vacuous claims that its events are “important” to those who like to catalogue the “facts” of a made-up universe. Naturally, it’s one of DC’s poorest sellers.


Spider-Man Fairy Tales issue 2 “The Spirits of Friendship” by C B Cebulski (writer), Niko Henderson (artist), Dave Landhear (letterer) and Molly Lazer (editor), 23 pages of strip, US$2.99, Marvel Comics, August 2007

This second issue of Spider-Man Fairy Tales is wholly separate from the first, drawing on West African myth rather than European household tale. God-cum-folk-hero Anansi sets off on a quest to find the spider orchid that will grant him new powers. On the way, he fights and befriends four elementals, and eventually decides that their friendship is of more value than his original aim. The Bee creature that they all kill together to get at the orchid might wish that Anansi had reached this conclusion rather earlier.

“The Spirits of Friendship” scores over the previous issue by making less use of aspects of conventional Spider-Man stories, uncomfortably shoe-horned into place. Here, the only intrusive echo of the Marvel Universe is the appearance of Anansi’s Uncle Nebasti, to remind him of the old line about great power and great responsibility. You could, if you wish, regard the four elementals as being avatars of the Fantastic Four, but this relationship is neither obvious nor forced, and can be easily ignored.

Niko Henderson provides sinuous and earthy artwork that is wholly appropriate to the tale. C B Cebulski uses a narrative voice that has something of the tone of stiff formality we associate with translations of folk tales. They may all sit together a little oddly in the eventual trade paperback, but the individual issues of this limited series are worth a look.



The Spirit issue 7, 24 pages of strip, cover by Darwyn Cooke, US$2.99, DC Comics, August 2007
Features “Harder than Diamonds” written by Walter Simonson, art by Chris Sprouse and Karl Story, colour by Dave Stewart, letters by Jared Fletcher, editor Scott Dunbier
“Synchronicity” Jimmy Palmiotti (story), Jordi Bernet (art), Dave Stewart (colours), Jared Fletcher (letters) and Scott Dunbier (editor)
“Hard Cell” by Kyle Baker (story and art), coloured by Dave Stewart, editor Scott Dunbier

For this issue, regular writer/artist Darwyn Cooke provides only a cover, which pretty much demands a soundtrack of ‘60s go-go music. Would it seem so amusing, I wonder, if it showed a crowd of hunky men stripping an attractive woman? And, if not, would that be hypocritical, or valid because the confirmation of stereotypical relationships is less pleasing than their overturn? Probably that’s too heavy a question for such a frothy image.

Simonson and Palmiotti provide their versions of two stock Spirit tropes. Simonson gives us the manipulative femme fatale, and Palmiotti writes a story of the Spirit’s actions affecting the lives of people he never meets. Despite attractive art by Sprouse, Story, Bernet and Stewart, these feel rather like Eisner pastiche by the numbers.

“Hard Cell” is a rare misfire from Kyle Baker. It seems more like a parody of Frank Miller’s Sin City than of Eisner’s or Cooke’s Spirit, complete with bad hard-boiled monologue and extreme chiaroscuro. There are some amusing jokes about the Spirit’s relationship with Ellen Dolan, but the whole story is sunk by a disjointed, fragmented narrative.

Grand Finale

This week’s episode of Doctor Who brings the current year’s run to an end. It will be interesting to see what head writer and executive producer Russell T Davies does to try to match the emotional impact of Rose’s exile last year or the Doctor’s death and regeneration before that.

Ah, yes. That regeneration.

Over the last three years, several Doctor Who episodes have drawn on bits of ancillary fiction. This year, the two-part “Human Nature/The Family of Blood” was adapted from a novel, and “Blink” was expanded from a short story. In previous years, “Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel” and “Dalek” used elements of a couple of CD audio plays.

But there’s another that I’ve never seen acknowledged (though that could be my lack of observation): “The Parting of the Ways” and the Doctor’s regeneration.

Doctor Who Magazine’s final comic strip story about the eighth (Paul McGann) Doctor, “The Flood”, concerned an invasion of present-day Earth by vastly advanced Cybermen from the future. At the climax of the story, the Doctor merges with a fragment of the Time Vortex, which the Cybermen have been using to power their time machine, and ages the Cybermen to dust in seconds. The story ends with a postscript showing the Doctor and his comics-only travelling companion, Destrii, heading off in search of new adventures.


“The Flood” has recently been reprinted by Panini as part of their paperback collections of Doctor Who strips. The endnotes to that collection reveal that Russell T Davies had originally offered the Magazine the opportunity to show the regeneration of the eighth Doctor into the ninth (Christopher Eccleston) Doctor. Comics writer Scott Gray and editor Clayton Hickman eventually turned down this offer, as Davies also insisted that all ninth Doctor comic strips should feature Rose. Gray and Hickman thought that to jump straight from a regeneration, with Destrii still in the TARDIS, to a Doctor-and-Rose setup would have created too many unanswerable questions about what happened in between.

So, to summarise. The last eighth Doctor comic strip, which Russell T Davies discussed extensively with the Magazine staff, would have ended like this: the Doctor merges with the Time Vortex, ages his enemies to dust, but is destroyed by the Vortex energy and has to regenerate.

The last ninth Doctor TV episode, written by Russell T Davies, ended like this: Rose merges with the Time Vortex and ages her enemies to dust; the Doctor absorbs the Vortex energy from Rose, but is destroyed by it and has to regenerate.

Quite a coincidence. Davies has, generally speaking, been quite open about his borrowings, so I suspect this was an unconscious echo. But perhaps it’s for the best that Gray and Hickman backed off from showing the regeneration, after all.


It’s the end …

This is the last post (until next year, anyway) in a series improvising around the themes of upcoming Doctor Who episodes. So to conclude, I’d like to share with you my favourite Doctor Who comic strip ever, by Richard A Starkings, from the fanzine TARDIS.

(Click to enlarge)


Panels
Doctor Who “The Flood” part 8, by Scott Gray (story), Martin Geraghty (pencil art), David A Roach (inking), Adrian Salmon (colours), Roger Langridge (lettering), Clayton Hickman (editor), Doctor Who Magazine issue 353, 2005, reprinted in Doctor Who: The Flood, Panini Books, 2007

Doctor Who by Richard A Starkings, TARDIS: The Quarterly Magazine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society Volume 8 Number 4, January 1984

Faithful unto Undeath

Dark Horse Comics is publishing next month the first volume of its collected Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus. (Update, 29 June: it actually came out this week.) Here’s part of the blurb:

“The definitive comics collection of all things Buffy starts here. This first massive volume begins at the beginning-The Origin, a faithful adaptation of creator Joss Whedon's original screenplay for the film that started it all …”

The emphasis on “faithful” is Dark Horse’s own. What do they mean by it?

As is well known, Joss Whedon was unhappy with the way the producers, director and cast of the movie version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer changed his script. It was in part a desire to treat the subject right that led him to respond positively to the suggestion of reworking it into a TV series.

The Dark Horse adaptation, first published in 1999, reversed some of those changes. For example, this version ends with Buffy burning down the gymnasium of her old school, just as Whedon scripted it, and in line with the references in “Welcome to the Hellmouth”.


But Dark Horse have made their own changes to the original script. Buffy is 15, not 18. She doesn’t get menstrual cramps when vampires are near. The vampires can’t fly (probably – a couple of panels are ambiguous, and I have half a premonition that the feet hanging over the demon stronghold in the recent comics story “The Long Way Home” might turn out to belong to the origin story’s villain, the ancient vampire Lothos). So it’s not exactly an accurate representation of - not really faithful to - the screenplay.


There are also whole scenes here that weren’t in the movie script. Two are adapted from the flashback scenes in the TV episode “Becoming, part 1”. So is The Origin faithful to the TV series first, and to the movie screenplay second, where that isn’t in conflict? Well, not really, because those scenes are changed. Buffy gains some extra dialogue to explain references to two different boyfriends in the two different sources, and her first fight with a vampire is totally different. A tag scene involving Buffy going to Las Vegas has no source in either the movie or the TV series, but serves as a hook on which Dark Horse could hang further “Year One” adventures (though it took them a few years to get round to that).

Is there anything wrong with Dark Horse making these changes? Not at all. They were valid choices when trying to make a coherent comic book out of disparate sources from different media. It’s the marketing I object to. The blurb on the original trade paperback collection just calls it an adaptation of Whedon's original script, with no spurious claim to fidelity.

Still and all, The Origin does score points by including the very primal Buffy scene, the idea from which Joss Whedon started, before he worked it up into a character or a story: a stereotypical blonde victim walks into a dark alley, is attacked by a monster, and kicks its ass.




Panels

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin issue 1 “Destiny Free”, issue 2 “Defenseless Mechanisms”, issue 3 “Disco Inferno” by Joss Whedon (original screenplay), Christopher Golden and Daniel Brereton (Script), Joe Bennett (Pencils), Rick Ketcham, Randy Emberlin and J. Jadsen (Inks), Jeromy Cox and Guy Major (Colors), Ken Bruzenak (Letters), Scott Allie and Ben Abernathy (editors), Dark Horse Comics, January – March 1999, reprinted in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Origin, Titan Books September 1999

“Anne Francis Stars In …”

Another female adventure character from the 1960s, another one-off Gold Key comic.

The TV series Honey West lived and died in the shadow of The Avengers. ABC television had evidently noticed the success of The Avengers in the UK, and wanted their own version. It ran for just one season (1965-66), before being cancelled to make way for the real thing. Honey West star Anne Francis reckoned that this was because The Avengers, having recouped its production costs in its home market, could be bought more cheaply. But it seems likely that ABC’s executives were also belatedly responding to the wave of anglophilia set off by the Beatles.

They may also have noticed that Honey West wasn’t all that good. Its half-hour episodes about the escapades of a Los Angeles private eye, her disapproving partner, and her pet ocelot are light and breezy, but they creak with the burden of middle-aged script writers trying desperately to be hip. Personally, I find that rather appealing, but The Avengers was constructing part of 1960s pop culture, while Honey West was just looking in.

Even so, Honey West offered a type of heroine that had probably never been seen before on US TV: confident, proficient, armed, and capable of throwing men around in a fight. And unlike Charlie’s Angels, producer Aaron Spelling’s next show about women detectives a decade later, Honey was clearly the boss.

Spelling’s source material was a series of novels by the semi-pseudonymous GG Fickling (“Fickling” was real, “GG” was fake), but all he kept were the name and the basic idea of a female PI. Fickling’s books were an attempt to write Mickey Spillane type thrillers with Marilyn Monroe in the role of Mike Hammer, but they are desperately crude in all senses of the word.

There’s a good site about the books here, and one about the TV series here. The entire series is available on Region 0 PAL DVD.

Gold Key’s comic book adaptation was produced in 1966. It contains two 16-page stories, “The Underwater Raiders”, about a jewel robbery on board a ship, and “The Fall Guy”, about an attempt to fix a wrestling match.

The Grand Comics Database attributes both stories to Paul S Newman (script) and Jack Sparling (art); but I suspect that there may, at least, have been different inkers at work. Here are a couple of extracts from “The Underwater Raiders”.



And here are some panels from “The Fall Guy”.




Some of those later panels remind me of Dan Spiegle. The likenesses are better, and the inking style is reminiscent of his work on Nemesis in The Brave and the Bold, but the compositions aren’t up to his standard.

The comic can best be described as “functional”. By Gold Key standards, that’s pretty good, but still hardly worth seeking out.

Update, 27 June 2007 Added two more scans.

Pictures and Panels
Honey West issue 1, Gold Key/KK Publications, 1966

The Other Cyd Child

One of the tidbits of information in the extras included in Titan’s series of Modesty Blaise reprints is that original artist Jim Holdaway had a set of reference photos taken to help him with the fight scenes, modelled by European women’s judo champion Cyd Child.

Child also worked as a stunt artist, and often doubled for Diana Rigg in The Avengers. So, stretching a point, you could say that she played both Modesty Blaise and Emma Peel, which is quite an achievement.

The history of The Avengers in comics was covered in an article by Ian Wheeler, John Freeman and Dez Skinn in Comic International issue 201, and is the subject of a fine web-site, The Avengers Illustrated.

Among my pitifully small collection of issues of TV Comic is issue 720, from October 1965, which marked the start of a seven-year run of The Avengers, off and on.


(Is it just me, or should those dialogue balloons be read manga-style?)

Some of the TV Comic strips were reprinted for the American market by Gold Key. Although the indicia name the single issue they produced as The Avengers, the cover carries the title John Steed, Emma Peel, presumably to avoid confusion and trademark conflicts with Marvel’s super-hero team. The Avengers Illustrated shows the photographic covers, but here is how the newly-coloured interior art appears.


By far the best comic strip version of The Avengers ever put into print was the mini-series Steed and Mrs Peel (which also features Tara King), published by Eclipse Comics and Acme Press between 1990 and 1992, and written and drawn by Grant Morrison and Ian Gibson, perhaps the most perfect combination of creators and subject that I can think of. Confusingly, the back-up strip, about Mrs Peel’s reunion with her husband, was also drawn by Gibson, though it was written by Anne Caulfield. The back-up is quite amusing, but not a patch on the main feature, “The Golden Game”.

Again, The Avengers Illustrated only shows the covers, so here is a sample of the interior.


“The Golden Game” is a clever and witty story, and deserves a trade paperback if anyone can get the reprinting rights.


Panels
The Avengers, first instalment, art probably by Pat Williams, TV Comic issue 720, 2 October 1965

John Steed, Emma Peel “The Roman Invasion”, art probably by Pat Williams, from The Avengers issue 1, Gold Key, 1968, reprinted from TV Comic

Steed and Mrs Peel book 1, “The Golden Game” part 1 “Crown and Anchor” by Grant Morrison (writer), Ian Gibson (artist), Ellie de Ville (letterer) and Dick Hansom (editor), Eclipse Comics and Acme Press, 1990