Steve Does Comics

Well, it's certainly been an exciting day here in Le Royaume-Uni as people have been busily rushing to the polls.

Needless to say, I'm on the side of whichever side wins. Unless it's a draw. In which case I'm on both sides. Frankly, all I care about is the Loch Ness Monster. As long as that's happy, I'm happy.

This has been the sort of in-depth political analysis that only this blog can bring you because only this blog doesn't know what it's on about.

One man who definitely knew what he was on about was Monark Starstalker, Howard Chaykin's outer space bounty hunter from Marvel Premiere #32. Like Chaykin's earlier character the Scorpion, when he sets his sights on a target, that target had better watch out.

What happens is this. Starstalker lands on the planet Stormking which somewhat resembles an old wild west town, sets out to bring in a wrongdoer called Kurt Hammer - dead or alive - and quickly brings him in dead.

He does this with the aid of a robot falcon that serves as his ears and eyes, thanks to his own senses having been destroyed in an outer space incident some time ago.

Along the way, he picks up a female ally who just seems to appear from thin air, and he ruffles a few local feathers.

I do have to admit that this was probably my least favourite issue of any comic I owned when I was a kid. At the time, I could appreciate that it looked quite pretty but, for whatever reason, I couldn't get into it at all as a story.

I have to say that, reading it again for the first time since then, I still can't get into it. It still looks pretty enough but the visual story-telling is often confusing, needing captions to help make sense of what the pictures are supposed to be showing and there are times when even with captions, it's hard to understand what's going on. For instance, characters just seem to appear and disappear without it being obvious just where they've come from or gone to.

Added to all this, Starstalker has no personality at all for the reader to latch onto. He basically shows up, does what he set out to do and then leaves, with no real insight into who he is or why he's doing any of the things he's doing.

In fact, it's not clear why anyone in the tale is doing what they're doing.

In fact, it's not that clear who anyone in the story actually is.

In a way, it's nice to know my eleven year old self agreed with my no-longer-eleven-year-old self and had a wisdom I might have thought beyond him but I like to like things and therefore it would have been nice for him to have been proven wrong.


Potential further reading:

Suffering shads! It's the return of the feature that's left the internet in tatters, as I once more drone on randomly about comics I've owned.

Just what'll be turned up by this veritable Pick and Mix?

Only a rifle through Steve's Lucky Bag of Confusion can tell us...


Superman's definitely in need of a good slap on this cover.

Inside, Hawkman quits the Justice League, and Eclipso might be involved.

Other than that I can recall little of the contents.

It's always nice to see a Nick Cardy cover though.

It's one of the few Original X-Men stories I ever liked, as the merry Marvel mutants find themselves on trial in the court of Factor 3.

I seem to remember that Ross Andru drew this issue, which could explain why it appealed to me more than their tales usually did.

Some bloke builds a big gun to commit crimes with and Thor has to stop him, in a tale of squabbling siblings.

The issue that introduced me to DC's man of mystery.

From what I can recall of this tale, the Phantom Stranger's called in to try and help establish whether a defendant's plea of insanity is genuine or not. Needless to say, there's a twist at the end.

It's the story we all wanted to see, as Conan takes on Kull.

Red Sonja and Belit, meanwhile, continue their bickering.

It's one of my fave Marvel monster tales, as Grogg causes no end of bother.

Sadly, we still get no answer to the enduring mystery of where Marvel's giant monsters buy those underpants from.

It's the only issue of Swamp-Thing I ever owned. It's from after Bernie Wrightson left the strip but that doesn't mean it lets us down on the pictorial front, thanks to some lovely interior work by Nestor Redondo.

It had stylish artwork by Howard Chaykin but I always remember this as being one of the few American comics I had as a child that I could never get on with.