I'm in sight of my 400th post but I suspect that might not appear until early next February. I am just managing weekly posts, despite a shoulder injury and sciatica which occurred when I moved out of two flats during the summer- and despite a health issue that's been ongoing for nearly two years. Our Head Teacher acknowledged our subject's workload in our annual review meeting this week and that also has its impact. Finally, I want to do a bit of Xmas shopping at Brodie in Forres and in Inverness over the next two weekends.
So today, I'll complete the review of DC's Thriller maxi-series from the early Eighties, which I began in https://somefantasticplace-dougie.blogspot.com/2018/11/failure-so-thorough-yet-so-superb.html last month. Thriller was an experimental title with a futuristic setting, yet populated by an extended family of quirky anti-terrorist operatives in the pulp mould of Doc Savage's Fabulous Five or the Shadow's agents.
Issue 7 is entitled " Valentine's Day" and is something of a showcase for the vampish White Satin (aka Janet Valentine) and her "late" husband Quo. The concerns of 80s America are reflected in a foreshadowing plot sequence, where a US jet is fired upon by Soviet planes.
We learn that enigmatic villain Moses Lusk, father of the terrorist/nanny Molly, is a former colleague of Edward Thriller. Quo is revealed to be a martial artist and guru who "advanced too far " spiritually and became a conceptual being- like Bruce Lee crossed with Englehart's Mantis.
The START Corporation, a computer manufacturer, is positioned as a shadowy threat and on the letters page, Thriller is likened to tv hit Hill Street Blues, with its loose ensemble of characters. But there are continuing criticisms that it lacks direction and cohesion. Editor Alan Gold announces that "Valentine's Day" is the last issue of the Loren Fleming/ Trevor Von Eeden collaboration. Bill Dubay is taking over as writer.
Gold continues with increasingly scathing remarks: he begins with his opinion that the story was possibly developing too slowly for its own good. But then, astonishingly, he writes that the title was "succumbing to phoney-baloney mystification" and even (cuttingly) "artsy-shmartishness", He sees himself retooling a " bug-ridden gizmo."
In issue 8, Von Eeden's last, "Downfall". the Soviets have shot down Janet's jet and in some very awkward exposition, we are told "Your Mrs. Thriller has learned of our ultimate weapon: a man-made god." This entity is code-named Infant, a sentient biological computer who wants to die.
Like Englehart's Thriller, which I want to review next year and Barr's Batman and the Outsiders, Gorbachev's Russia is an overtly villainous superpower. It's reminiscent of Marvel's 60s conception of the bloc that brought us the Gargoyle, the Red Ghost and the Red Barbarian, the Crimson Dynamo and the Black Widow.
On the letters page again, where readers speak positively of New Wave sci-fi, others decry "extreme layouts", to which editor Gold endorses: " Amen!" Announcing that Von Eeden is also leaving the book, he hopes for a " dramatic upswing in sales".
Issue 9 is memorably entitled "East of Euthanasia" and is drawn by Filipino artist Alex Nino. I really only know his work from an REH adaptation, People of the Dark, which I read early this decade or at the end of the last one I think, in a Marvel Conan Treasury.
Rescuing Janet, the Seven Seconds enter Russia's facility, The Vault , where synthetic proteins are in danger of evolving into Earth's dominant lifeform.
Gold' s letters page acknowledges that the original creative team were taking risks but dismisses that material as "extremely obscure". He even goes as far as to admonish enthusiastic fan Dave Goyer with "calm down"! Goyer would of course co-write the late 90s JSA title and screen-write Blade, Ghost Rider and the Dark Knight and Man of Steel movies .Gold mollifies readers with the promise of a future story from Fleming and fan-favourite Keith Giffen, whose style might've suited Thriller well.
Personally, my enjoyment of Thriller nosedives terribly with these issues. I find the plotting and scripting lacks any subtlety although I do accept that the Seven Seconds are clearly defined here as modern-day pulp adventurers.
Issue 10, "Seven Seconds to Armageddon" depicts the team's creation. Faith Verity, the enlightened secretary -general of the UN ( with a crashingly unsubtle name worthy of Mike Friedrich) assembled the original Seven Seconds: Tony, Angie, Edward, Moses Lusk, Beaker, Iskariot ( whom we've met as a villain) and Richard "Quo" Quorum.
Faith Verity is assassinated and Lusk launches a nuclear attack which kills 20 million people. Conceptual entities Quo and Angie turn back time, however, like the Reeve Superman, which I found hugely unsatisfying. Gold reveals that Fleming "asked" off the project. It was his first major professional assignment but Gold- his editor- judges it too slow and diffuse.
11 reveals that messianic scientist Moses Lusk is Angie's biological father. We are also told that the new Golden Age that began last issue is already ending. Humanity is inherently barbaric, it seems and Faith ( both literally and figuratively) died for nothing.
Gold's letters page announces that Thriller is to be cancelled with its twelfth issue and the Giffen/Fleming story is on hold. I don't know if it ever saw print anywhere.
Thriller ends therefore with issue 12, cover-dated November 1984; just over 34 years ago. Data ends the threat of the START Corporation and its figurehead, Ronald Morris, "the most trusted man in America" is revealed to be a computer -generated image - shades of Max Headroom, also introduced in 1984.
The final letters page is a welter of recrimination. The Dubay issues are condemned for verbiage and conventionality. Gold retaliates, telling readers they were "naïve" and "wrong-headed" finding profundity in an "attractive muddle". Other correspondents are equally blunt, finding the Dubay issues dull and hacked-out by comparison.
Gold presents himself as the creators' sympathetic buddy:"I would have sat Bob and Trevor down with a keg between them if I thought beer could have brought them back together. DC deserves none of the blame for the break-up." But other fans are lacerating: the Operation Armageddon story was "
paper-thin"; " badly-drawn" and they "felt less than nothing for the loss of all that life". One letter-writer witheringly ( and I feel, a shade unfairly) deals a killer blow: "more clutter and needless wordage here than a year of Roy Thomas comics".
That's the note on which Thriller ends. I find Gold's shifting of responsibility unseemly and unprofessional. He throws Fleming "under the bus" but where was his editorial accountability?
It's interesting to compare his diatribes with his subsequent defence of the Conway/Patton Justice League of America, where he pleads for time and patience from the disgruntled audience. Ironically, too, whether he meant it or not, since the majority of the Detroit League have had extremely successful tv incarnations in the last few years.
I preferred and enjoyed the oddity of the original conception of Thriller and as I say, it makes me want to look again at other 80s experiments. Coming up here in future though: more of the Thirteenth Doctor; Jake Dudman; UNIT and in the new year, Black Lightning, Fritz Leiber, Daleks and Dracula.
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