There's a big elephant in the room of my occasional posts about the comics work of people who wrote my all-time favourite cartoon, Thundercats. I do have fun appreciating the varied and fascinating comics produced by the likes of Leonard Starr, Bob Haney, Howard Post and Ron Goulart in the course of their long, productive and successful lives, and I'd like to share more wonders from people who wrote really great Thundercats episodes and contributed in one way or another to really cool comics too. But there's a shortage of people who fall into that very narrow category, and there's just that one name that I haven't really been able to do an article about.
And that's Stephen Perry. I've refrained from writing about him for two reasons. Search for him on the internet, if you can find him among all the other notable people with the same name, and you'll only find one thing - the gory details of how he was horribly murdered in 2010. Maybe with a few added notes to the effect that he was penniless and unhappy before he died. It's the kind of thing that deflates a light-hearted ramble about comics, whether you actually mention it or not.
I might have written something before now anyway, if there was a comic of his I wanted to admire at length, but that's the second problem right there. His Thundercats writing was really, really great! There should be some other work of his out there that could captivate me, right? And I've tried my best to plough through Timespirits, which sounds like a personal project that would give full scope to his creativity, and I can't even finish it. Don't ask me why. Likewise, the opening story of Psi-Force, where Perry had the job of introducing the team of pre-designed new characters - something he should have been very good at - doesn't capture my interest at all. There must be something out there, surely, but I've never found it yet.
But someone has been chatting to me on the internet about their recent discovery of the wonders of Thundercats, including reference to this very specific subject, so having got all that bad stuff out in the open, please join me in scrutinising Safari Joe!
Joe with an E, you'll notice. That's the name that appears in the title card of the cartoon, and when they made a toy of the character, he was Safari Joe with an E too. But for some reason when the cartoon episode was adapted into comic form, with Steve Perry again the only credited writer, he'd changed for some reason into Safari Jo!
That's the title page of the 14th issue of Marvel's Star Comics Thundercats series. A bit of a strange double-credit for Steve Perry adapting the teleplay of Steve Perry, and when it was reprinted in the British Marvel comic they only credited him once, but at least it doesn't leave us in any doubt as to who wrote it!
Apart from a few new narrative captions, the script of the comic is basically identical to the dialogue of the cartoon. And it was a story specifically written for the animated form, which loses something when reduced to a comic. There are just two fun points worth talking about in detail...
In the cartoon version of this scene, Wilykit's line "I thought Panthro fixed it!" is missing. Safari Joe's quip is still there, but is a completely meaningless non-sequitur! I mean, even with the feed line it's still pretty meaningless, but at least it doesn't come completely out of nowhere. I assume it was in the original cartoon script, but somehow ended up being cut out to trim the episode for time, by someone who didn't really think it through. It's good to see the comic adaptation making some sort of sense of it, at least!
And incidentally, this whole spaceboarding scene is a specific reference to the earlier episode The Time Capsule, written by Peter Lawrence. This is intriguing, because Thundercats was a series where individual writers had an amazing amount of freedom to do their own thing without editorial interference! It's very rare to see such continuity between episodes written by different people! Which leads into the second fascinating difference...
The technical details of the Thundercats' powers and weapons are a lot more extensive in the comic than they were on screen. Maybe cut for time or pacing again, or maybe added into the comic script because technical jargon works a lot better in written form? But that's not the really fascinating bit. The bit that's really fun is Tygra's weakness - "Tygra cannot swim."
I don't know if that's something Stephen Perry randomly made up, or if it was a line from the character bible. Cheetara's weakness (can only maintain top speed for short distances) is certainly a defined character trait, used by head writer Leonard Starr elsewhere. But then, that's a standard feature of real-life cheetahs, while real-life tigers are excellent swimmers. So who knows?
The point is, that's not how it sounds on screen. In the cartoon episode, we get the absolutely ludicrous line "Except when he's invisible, Tygra cannot swim."
That was clearly an editorial change to Stephen Perry's script. It's handwaving away the episode The Fireballs of Plun-Darr (written by William Overgard), in which Tygra does a lot of swimming. Most but not all of it while he's invisible. Watching the episode for the first time as a ten-year-old, I thought this line extraordinarily stupid and thought they would have been better off just not lampshading it like that [people didn't say 'lampshading' in those days, but you know what I mean].
Because this is exactly the kind of thing that Thundercats never did! As mentioned above, each writer just did their own thing and nobody changed their scripts to fit with what some other writer had said! Except in this case. Was it Peter Lawrence's editing, or Stephen Perry noticing the discrepancy and fixing it? I'd like to know. One of these days I'll track Peter Lawrence down and bombard him with hopelessly minute questions about a cartoon he made forty years ago, but I'll wait till I've gone completely insane first.
Because Panthro's only weakness ("Panthro fears bats") in the following scene is also contradicted by The Fireballs of Plun-Darr! The comical ending of that episode tells us that Panthro's scared of spiders! And neither Lawrence nor Perry felt the need to add an "and spiders too" to the cartoon or comic script!
So that's the fun of Safari Jo or Joe - rest in peace, Stephen Perry! A great hero of cartoon history!
