CoronaVirus Comics PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Long Road Home" Part 1

Remember when a pandemic created vampires who took over the world in 2010?

No, I don't mean the Twilight or True Blood franchises...

Be here Next Wednesday, as the astronauts are forced to chose sides.

The early 1970s was one of the more pessimistic periods in pop culture.

Between pollution/ecology concerns, potential overpopulation, and possible war, fear was running wild in pop culture, in particular, movies.

The near-future was believed to be a potential Hell on Earth, with movies like A Clockwork Orange (crime and violence held in check only by mind-control), Soylent Green (overpopulation and food shortages relieved by using humans as food), ZPG (controlled breeding to avoid overpopulation), and Omega Man (man-made plague kills most of humanity and leaves remainder as mutant ghouls).

Even films about the distant future like Zardoz and the Planet of the Apes series showed humanity as either decadent and collapsing, or under control of other species!

Writer Larry Hama and penciler Pat Broderick combined several of the concepts in Seaboard's Planet of Vampires #1 (1973).

It was one of the stronger titles of the new company formed to compete with Marvel and DC, but both internal problems between the publishers and creatives as well as failure to gain newsstand space (there were no comic shops at the time), doomed the company to a short life.

Next Wednesday

The Terrible Truth!

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I Am Legend

(the graphic novel verson of the novel, adapted into the then-current movie Omega Man, which "inspired" this series!)

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Blood Plague" Conclusion

When Last We Left Our Heroes...

This scene...sorta...appears in this issue

Astronauts Chris and Craig invade the vampires' stronghold only to discover Craig's wife (and fellow astronaut) Brenda drained dry, as shown on the cover above.
(Except for the fact that Craig has a moustache and both Craig and Brenda are African-American, as shown HERE.)
Leaving Craig to mourn, Chris blasts his way into the Proctor's office...

What was "the Secret Project"?

We never found out, since the book was cancelled!

But it was already going though the transition that almost all the Atlas books that lasted more than two issues went through.

Radical changes in creative staffs, plotlines, even characters themselves were the norm as mercurial publisher Martin Goodman began shaking things up.

It's a sordid tale best told by one who was there, so click HERE for the details!

As for Planet of Vampires, the word was to make it more like Planet of the Apes and/or Kamandi.

This two-page spread by Larry Lieber and Al Milgrom gives an idea of what was to come...

Perhaps it's just as well there was no #4...

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Blood Plague" Part 1

When Last We Left Our Heroes...

...keep reading and the characters will explain what's going on right after the big explosion.
"What big explosion?" you may ask...

The battle continues...tomorrow!

Written by John Albano and illustrated by Russ Heath, Atlas' Planet of Vampires #3 winds up some plotlines and, unfortunately, kills off several major characters in the process.

Be here tomorrow, when we'll show how far afield the book was about to go as it suffered the "Third Issue Curse" that befell most of the Atlas books.

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Quest for Blood" Conclusion

We Have Already Seen...

...(actually we haven't seen this, since there's no scene like it in the book.

Nor is there a cloaked, sinisterly-snarling vampire!

But it's a great Neal Adams/Dick Giordano cover, eh?)

Escaping the scientific blood-suckers who inhabit the Dome in the center of a devastated Manhattan, our four surviving astronauts team up with the primitive, but human Street People.

Rigging a stolen aircraft as a booby-trap, they destroy two pursuing ships sent to recapture them.

There's only one more, never-reprinted issue of this series from 40 years ago, and you'll see it in a couple of weeks.

But the sci-fi scares continue...tomorrow!

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Quest for Blood" Part 1

In the 1970s, science fiction writers thought the 21st century was going to be rather dystopic...

...as this never-reprinted tale from Atlas' Planet of Vampires #2 (1975) demonstrates!

It's always fun to end a chapter with a BANG!

But LOTS more action awaits us...

...TOMORROW!

With the departure of writer/co-creator Larry Hama, John Albano (Jonah Hex) stepped in to the scripting slot, working off Hama's basic plot for the issue as well as several pages already laid out by penciler/co-creator Pat Broderick.

It'a a pretty good job, making the transition pretty seamless between the two writers.

Be here tomorrow, as the astronauts and street people take the fight back to the "domies"!

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Long Road Home" Conclusion

We Have Already Seen...

Art by Pat Broderick and Neal Adams

...well, that kool cover says it all, doesn't it?

BTW, though the cover says six astronauts, we only see five, including Dr Ben Levitz, who was killed by savages when the crew first reached shore after crash-landing off Coney Island!

The "sixth astronaut" is never mentioned by name...or even shown in the background...anywhere in the issue!

In 2008, a team of astronauts exploring Mars lose contact with Earth.

After a two-year voyage, they return to find most of the planet devastated and the survivors apparently devolved to primitive savages!

However, some people in Manhattan managed to keep technology functioning and a relatively-civilized society going under an impenetrable dome...but at what cost to their humanity?

This never-reprinted first issue of Atlas/Seaboard's Planet of Vampires (1975) was Larry Hama's intro to comic scriptwriting.

Hama had been a penciler/inker apprenticing under Wally Wood before landing his first ongoing gig; penciling Iron Fist in Marvel Premiere.

But when John Byrne was given Iron Fist (which moved into it's own comic), Hama was without steady work.

The brand-new Atlas/Seaboard company welcomed the young creative with open arms, giving him two books: Planet of Vampires, which he scripted, and Wulf the Barbarian, which he both wrote and penciled.

Larry ended up leaving both the books (and the company) when the publisher refused to allow leeway on the deadlines when Hama's mother was dying, forcing the young writer/artist to bring in a host of pro friends to meet the deadlines while he dealt with the personal loss and handled funeral arrangements.

Hama went on to much bigger things like GI Joe, while Atlas/Seaboard went out of business within a year.