Today's post is another in an informal series on Mars in comics and pulp fiction.
I had encountered Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian chronicles in the lurid early-70s DC series Weird Worlds. Contemporaneously, a merry-go-round of Marvel creators concocted a sequel to Wells's imperialist allegory, The War of the Worlds, set in far-off 2001, in the pages of one of their former "split-books".
My very first issue of Amazing Adventures featuring Killraven was bought on a very rare visit to my mum's hometown of Stonehouse in the very early 70s. It's by Marv Wolfman and Herb Trimpe and it's a very typical "grindcore" Bronze Age Marvel product.
While it began as a sword and science fantasy, however, ( and probably the inspiration for DC's short-lived Starfire ), under the guidance of Don McGregor and Craig Russell, WOTW grew into a more idiosyncratic, adult and groovy series. Like a sci-fi Spartacus, the red-haired gladiator led his "Freemen" in a rebellion against their alien overlords (alongside a vague quest for his missing brother.)
The Freemen inhabited a ruined America, not unlike the one glimpsed in Logan's Run, where a Martian invasion stopped short the chaos engendered by consumerism and pollution. A world where mankind seems to have been punished for its hubris by an interplanetary infestation of man-eating, sadistic squid.
I didn't read another Killraven story until US Marvels began to return to newsagents in Lanarkshire in 1975-76. "The 24-Hour-Man" is a bizarre sci-fi horror story about sex, death and madness. Then, out of synch, I read the tragic and brutal "A Death In The Family" where two of the cast are killed by the grotesque cyborg stalker Skar. For a brief period, Killraven was the title of the series, rather than War of The Worlds.
My next issue was "Red Dust Legacy" featuring a clash between Killraven and the assertive Carmilla Frost and an insight into the birth practices of the Martians.
My next encounter with the Freemen was in Marvel Team-Up, where I first encountered Sal Buscema's version of Volcana Ash and glimpsed Mint Julep. Back in the regular bi-monthly series,
"Arena Kill" presented the origins of the gentle Old Skull, counterpointed by a prescient vision of factory farming.
Then, in Galloway in the summer of 1976- in Glenluce if I remember correctly- I got my next, out-of-sequence copy of AA.
"Only the Computer Shows me Any Respect" is a stunning achievement. A meditation on music and entertainment, on role-playing and the dangers of fantasy, it explores something of the backstory of Hawk, the indigenous American Freeman, who would meet a similar fate to the X-Men's Thunderbird. There's also a cameo appearance for Don McGregor's Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Hodiah Twist.
As was often the case with Marvels in the mid-Bronze Age, the next issue was a fill-in by Mantlo and Giffen, with some hallucinatory guest-stars from the Marvel Universe, which like Spider-Man in MTU, would seem jarring in the Freemen's world.
My very last AA issue was one of three in a Marvel Grab-Bag I got in Lewis's department store in Glasgow in 1979 or 1980- I forget which. The lyrical "Morning After Mourning Prey" is a haunting, squirmy organic horror fable about an enigmatic butterfly-woman.
Of course, in the mid-70s, the Killraven saga had taken a weird and amusing detour. The strip was edited, partially redrawn and presented to the UK audience as Apeslayer, to keep up with the US POTA material. My favourite thing about this audacious and absurdist parallel incarnation is the re-naming of Carmilla Frost as the pun-tastic "San Simian".
While the later AA stories would be reprinted I UK monthlies in the early 80s, I finally read the collected series and its 1982 graphic novel continuation in a b/w Essential Edition, about a decade ago. It's boxed away at present, awaiting my house move later this month. As I said previously, I had collected some reading material for a vaguely-planned trip to Galloway last month, including the hardback of Killraven by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer.
The 2007 six-issue series was one I missed out on, presumably because of my student budget when I was doing my teacher training. Davis stated that he was a fan of Neal Adams's original conception of Killraven, including, I assume, his Zardoz-style "harness".
I'm afraid I wasn't very engaged by the book yesterday. Davis's series lacks the pretension of McGregor but also his florid lyricism and Craig Russell's ornate, dream-like artwork. Aside from the amoral Mint Julep, the Freemen aren't nearly as complex. The relationship between the scientist -collaborator Carmilla Frost and the gladiator M'Shulla is still in place but her scientific background is missing.The pyrokinetic Volcana Ash is still the survivor of an experiment but her quest for her lost sister is consigned to oblivion. Her sexual assertiveness is present to some extent and is it my imagination that she resembles Alex Kingston's River Song? Hawk is a braggart and pragmatist but his bitterness and Native American heritage have been excised. The tragic "Clonal Man" Grok is now a Martian infiltrator and the tragedy and horror of his origins are lost.
There's no equivalent to the Musketeer-like slaver Sabre or the bizarre Rattack. No Deathraven or High Overlord, although the mutated Sirens play a bigger role. The battle doesn't go to Mars as McGregor had intimated and is only won on Earth because a Martian faction retreats. Nor does Davis employ the surreal and prophetic Mural Phonics System, a 70s precursor to virtual reality. It's a clinical world of slaves and masters but rather bland and twenty-First Century. Very JJ Abrams, in fact.
Ultimately, while his art style is as sleek as ever, Davis's dystopia is a pedestrian one. It's nowhere as strange and nightmarish as McGregor and Russell's Earth Under The Martians
Coming soon: A Princess of Mars
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