Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Long Road Home" Conclusion

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.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Long Road Home" Part 1

Remember when vampires took over the world in 2010?
No, I don't mean the Twilight or True Blood franchises...
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).

Monday, July 27, 2015

Reading Room KIDNAPPED BY A SPACE SHIP "Part 7 - A Mountain Explodes!"

Trapped on an alien world, a group of humans and their alien allies fight to survive...
...fighting savages and the clock as a rogue planet hurtles towards them!
Ah, the classic Daffy Duck "Scarlet Pumpernickel" trope; when you're stuck for a climax to your story, unleash a volcano, even if it's totally-unrelated to anything else in the story!
This tale from Treasure Chest V14N17 (1959) is the penultimate chapter in the serialized storyline, so writer Frances Crandall and artist Fran Matera decided to "go for broke"!

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Now Available: 2016 12-Month Pop-Culture Calendars!

Plus MANY MORE!
Classic comic book and pulp magazine covers and movie posters, scanned from the originals and digitally-remastered and restored!
NOT available in stores, only on-line! Order now...before time runs out! ;-)

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Before PIXELS...there was ATARI FORCE!

The new flick Pixels plays nostalgia of the first generation of video games for laughs...
...but for those of us who were there, it was an exciting time as a new entertainment medium was born.
Much like the Golden Age of Comics in the 1940s, it was a period of experimentation.
Atari tried to tie the various unrelated games together by incorporating the concepts for the games into a digest-sized comic book series available included in the cartridge packages...
DC Comics produced five issues of Atari Force in this format, with each one using themes from the game they were packaged with as the basis for their plots.
Creators for these never-reprinted issues included Roy Thomas, Gerry Conway, Ross Andru, Dick Giordano, and Gil Kane.
Apparently, they were successful enough that DC then published a regular comic-sized sequel series that featured a "next generation" Force made up of children of the original crew plus new, alien, team members.
That version ran almost three years before being cancelled under murky circumstances, despite being one of DC's better-selling titles.
(Many believe it was due to Atari's being broken up and sold off by DC's parent company, Time-Warner after a major collapse in the video game industry in the mid-1980s.)
Recently, Dynamite Publishing announced they'd be doing licensed reprints of the original comics as well as new stories based on them.
We re-presented the first issue on our "brother" RetroBlog, Secret Sanctum of Captain Video, a while ago.
While we won't run any further tales since they'll soon be available in print again, you can see the complete first issue by clicking HERE.