So you can afford a car, a plane, and a boat, but not even a lousy train ticket?
Wonderworld Comics #6
Fox Features Publications (October, 1939; courtesy Comic Book Plus)
I think I’ve decided how to go through these comics. This is not the only anthology comic and there’s no continuity in the Golden Age. So I’m going to do the anthology comics first, since some of the stories in the solo titles, and the Flame from this comic does have a solo series (no love for Wonder Man), are just reprints from the anthology before having solo-original stories. So I’ll do all the anthologies, then go back for the solo offerings.
Also of note is that the scans at Comic Book Plus are missing a few stories, so I can only review the stories actually in this issue. This also includes the text stories I don’t usually review but the full story is missing for the tales absent while no pages appear to be missing from the ones that are here. I’m guessing the only copy they could find so many decades out was minus a few tales. So here’s the ones I can talk about. Link is in the opening above.
If you don’t follow the daily comic reviews, Star Blazers: The Magazine Of Space Battleship Yamato was produced by Argo Press, a division of Voyager Entertainment. Voyager had been re-releasing the original Star Blazers dub of Space Battleship Yamato as well as the two Yamato movies The New Voyage and Be Forever Yamato. However, the comic didn’t sell well, first forcing them to drop the magazine section “Analyzer” to focus on the comic story, and then canceling partway through the adaptation of Be Forever Yamato.
Earlier this month, while I was setting up Christmas decorations I knocked over the little rack where I keep the comics I’m reviewing for that week and learned my copy of issue #10 has disappeared somewhere between getting out of the comic drawer earlier that week and that occasion. I don’t know what happened to it but I do have it somewhere and I needed to review it with the rest of the series now. So I went searching for a digital copy online. I figured I’d have to use a…legally questionable scan site to keep the reviews going but then I found Cosmo DNA, a Star Blazers fansite produced by Bruce Lewis and Tim Eldred, who worked on the comic portion of the magazine. I was happy to see they had a copy of #10 but I was in for a surprise.
Oh, I don’t like where this is going.
Lewis and Eldred were both fans of Star Blazers and each made a pitch to Comico to make a comic based on the series. Lewis wanted to make an original story and Eldred wanted to adapt the third season that had limited distribution in the US, the “Comet Wars” story arc in which Earth deals with a new threat in the form of the Comet Empire. Instead they worked on Robotech and Captain Harlock comics for Malibu’s “Eternity” imprint, which eventually allowed them to work on the Star Blazers comic magazine for Argo Press. Turn to a few weeks ago and I found their website, Cosmo DNA, and a section that featured PDF reprints of their entire run…and the unpublished 12th issue. Sadly, only a couple of pages were actually drawn, with no coloring. The rest of the file contains the script and some rough sketches of certain scenes and pages. Still, I got away with reviewing the info on the unpublished Transformers: Energon finale that had less than that available to me, so let’s see how this adaptation would have ended.
Also, I used the image they had there of the undressed cover art, small as the image file was, and images of other covers, to make a mock-up of issue #12’s cover, as seen on the left. Going through the book, all they need is a letterer and colorist and conceivably they could actually make the comic. Had I the time I might try to do just that for the practice, though it probably wouldn’t have been as good as what Eldred or the other colorists and letterers would have done, but I have my own project that I’m way behind on.
So here’s the page with all the scans. Scroll down and find the PDF file for #12 and check out the full history of Eldred and Lewis’s run while also seeing the issues you missed. Then you can search for my reviews here (I’ll help for this story arc:, then check out my review of the script. I’ll help for the reviews I’ve already done for this story arc, including the comic prelude story:
I must have miss this one, because I usually start the Christmas posts mentioning this. NORAD was once accidentally called about Santa Claus become some store ad used the wrong phone number for their Santa hotline. Since then, NORAD has been running a Santa Tracker even before there was an internet. “NORAD Tracks Santa” has a website now (and an app I hope they worked the bugs out of) complete with games, Christmas music, and other Christmas-themed activities for kids, plus on Christmas Eve they’ll let you know when it’s time to get the kids to sleep before Santa himself arrives. It’s one time that extra use of funds I’m okay with…given how much time and money the government usually wastes on stupid crap that only benefits themselves. Be careful in Russian and Ukraine this year.
PIlots are how a TV show is sold, but not every pilot becomes episode 1. Changes are asked for by the studio or the station (now also the streamer), cast changes happen for various reasons, and other events require the first pilot to be reshot or scrapped altogether. For example the original pilot of Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers bears little resemblance to the actual first episode. The same for the pilot episode of Star Trek, which we would know nothing about if it wasn’t for the two-part episode “The Menagerie” that used it for stock footage. The Power Rangers pilot aired as a special occasion on Fox Kids. Not every first pilot is available to us.
It’s kind of funny that with all of the actual episodes of Doctor Who missing thanks to poor archiving on the BBC’s part that somehow the original version of “An Unearthly Child” still exists, and was released on DVD as part of a box set with the aired version and following episodes. Having seen it via my DVD copy there are a lot of differences. If you thought the Doctor was different from his early years to the tortured action hero he/she became in New Who, here’s a video about the unaired pilot and the changes between versions. The script is the same and that’s pretty much it.
