Steve Does Comics

There was a time, long ago, when you could say you were a big fan of Isis without fearing the CIA were going to monitor all your phone calls from now on.

And that time was the 1970s when the heroine of that name was on our TV screens and in our comics.

She was like Wonder Woman but Egyptian instead of Greek, and obscure instead of iconic.

Granted when I say, "Our," I don't remember her ever being on my TV screen but I did, at least, experience her comic book incarnation, as I had a massive two issues of her mag.

Thinking about it, two issues was quite a lot, as the book only lasted for eight before folding.

Filled with the magic of Ancient Egypt, fully embracing bondage and supported by its own TV show, why did such a book fail? Why?

There's only one way to find out and that's to revisit the earliest of those two issues I possessed.

Fresh from having dealt with some threat to humanity, the mighty Isis is floating around the skies, woodland and cities of America, worrying about who she really is and why she keeps being rude to people, when Rick Mason, friend of her alter-ego Andrea Thomas, decides to investigate from where this mysterious heroine came.

So, he goes to the local museum and reads up on her, discovering, via a parchment, that she's probably the reincarnation of a young woman who once helped a benign wizard defeat Serpenotep the evil sorcerer who'd briefly taken over the land of the Nile.

The only problem is that, having worked all that out, Rick decides to totally ignore the parchment's warning to never say out loud a deadly phrase it contains, and the next thing he knows, he's been possessed by Serpenotep who's been lurking inside a nearby model pyramid for a few thousand years.

Admittedly, on the cover, it says one thousand years, meaning he was imprisoned in 977 AD, which suggests a little more research might have been needed from whoever worded the cover.

Suitably liberated, Serpenotep sets out to get his revenge on Isis, for trapping him in the model, and sets about turning innocent people into snakes.

Needless to say, our heroine isn't standing for that kind of nonsense and it's not long before she and her foe are conducting a battle of wits in the museum, one she wins, thanks to her knowing more about vacuums than he knows about plastic.

However, as she departs with Rick, she does so unaware that Serpenotep has control of his body and that Rick's mind is now trapped in the model pyramid.

Well this all sounds fine, so, why did it fail?

I think the fairly obvious answer is it's all far too low-key. Isis spends all her time, between fights, either fretting over her true nature or being haughty with mortals. She's nothing like as bad as the Silver Surfer but, then again, her agonising doesn't have anything like the same emotional content as his did. While he was always wracked with anguish over his psychological crises, she's just sort of a bit mopey about them.

There's also a problem that she seems to have no direct emotional link to her supporting cast of three characters, even though one of them is her mother, another is the man who loves her and the final one is her oldest enemy. They might as well be strangers for all the difference it makes.

On the plus side, her self-questioning and sense of alienation does seek to develop her more as a character than I would have expected from a spin-off of a Saturday morning children's TV show. It just doesn't develop her in a way that's particularly compelling.

In the end, writer Jack C Harris and artists Mike Vosburg and Frank Chiarmonte have given us a competent but workmanlike comic whose protagonist doesn't really engage us. There's nothing actively bad about the tale but there's nothing that makes you particularly want to find out what happens next either.

Ultimately, it all feels a bit depressed. Imagine Marvin the Paranoid Android created a comic. That's sort of what we've got here.

The Mighty Isis was, it seems, a 1970s TV show in the same vein as Wonder Woman although, as I never saw a single episode nor had even heard of it until I bought this comic, I can only assume it wasn't as celebrated or as popular as that venture. Upon Isis' TV excursion I can therefore pass no judgement but I can say that, given its TV tie-in nature, the comic's noticeably better than you'd expect.

From what I can make out, a woman called Andrea Thomas is in some way the reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian battler of evil, known as Isis, and is continuing the good work here in the 20th Century. With her mix of physical and magical powers, she seems to be an amalgam of the aforementioned Wonder Woman and Zatanna.

But, despite her heroic ways, not everyone's a fan. Believing her to be behind Andrea Thomas' disappearance, a man called Rick Mason - who I assume to be Andrea Thomas' boyfriend - sets out to discover who Isis is and what she's about.

The quest leads him to the local museum where, after ignoring all warnings not to read aloud from an ancient text, he's promptly possessed by the original arch-enemy of the original Isis, an evil priest called Serpenotep who sets about turning everyone into snakes, while Isis sets about turning them back again. It all ends with a fight in the museum, in which Isis' modern understanding of the behaviour of gases and vacuums enables her to defeat him.

Or so it seems.

As we leave the museum, we see the face of Rick Mason trapped within one of its exhibits, implying that the man who now appears to be Rick Mason is in fact Serpenotep.

From the letters page, I gather the strip had something of an overhaul in the issues directly preceding this one, and most of this tale's really about Isis trying to work out just who she is. Is she Andrea Thomas? Is she the original Isis? I suppose there's a similarity to Mighty Thor #158-159 where our hero was trying to work out if he was really Thor or Don Blake.

In fairness, The Mighty Isis #7 isn't really on that level of either creative aspiration or achievement but the introduction of such internal conflict does lend a greater level of depth to proceedings than you might expect given the strip's TV cash-in provenance. I also like the fact that Isis has to keep inwardly chiding herself for talking down to mere mortals.

Sadly, these efforts to make Isis an interesting comic book character in her own right were all for naught, as the strip was cancelled after the very next issue. It's a shame as there was clearly potential for it to be an interesting strip. Still, I gather the girl's made multiple returns over the years, so perhaps it's a bit early to be shedding a tear over her just yet and, with her power of reincarnation, she's demonstrated that coming back from the dead really is her greatest power.