Where man once stood supreme

 Do you remember when I said I'd run out of Thundercats writers with early comics work I could blog about for the benefit of my few-if-any readers who might find that kind of thing interesting? Do you also remember when I said that 47th issues of Marvel comics tend not to be anything to write home about? Both of these assertions might be contradicted in this blog post.

Thundercats, if you weren't paying attention, starts with four world-building episodes by head writer Leonard Starr, then five more episodes before the rest of the main team of writers (Peter Lawrence, Stephen Perry, William Overgard, Bob Haney) took over. Those five early episodes include one more by Starr, and four by Jules Bass under the pen-name Julian P. Gardner - one on which he gets sole credit, one with Barney Cohen, and the other two sharing the credit with Ron Goulart.

Goulart and Bass both died in 2022, so I'm rather late to pay tribute to their contribution to the whole universe of Thundercats. But Ron Goulart was well known as a writer of science-fiction and fantasy novels, and probably seemed like a good person to go to for story ideas in the future-Earth fantasy-style setting of Thundercats. But he didn't stick around after these two stories.

Among the other things Ron had dabbled in was a brief stint at Marvel comics in the early seventies, adapting classic fiction by Robert Bloch and H. P. Lovecraft into comic form for Marvel's brief revival of "Journey Into Mystery". I can only assume that led to him being around the office one day when they needed a writer for the latest issue of Warlock, because it's a bit of a digression from what he usually did...

Adam Warlock at this point in time was a character who hadn't really caught on. Like the new Journey Into Mystery, this comic was axed pretty quickly - but then it came back a couple of years later, written and drawn by Jim Starlin, and that was when Warlock became extremely cool! But back in 1972, it was drawn competently enough by Gil Kane, and after a first issue written by Roy Thomas the writing duties had been taken over by Mike Friedrich. And then for some reason, #5 was handed over to Ron Goulart to continue the story of Adam Warlock's adventures on Counter-Earth, just for one month. The next issue was scripted by Friedrich again, but with a credit to Goulart for the plot, "from an idea by Roy Thomas". Mike Friedrich was the writer of the two subsequent issues before it was cancelled.

And in 1975, Marvel UK picked it up to fill some space as a backup strip behind the popular movie and TV-inspired Planet of the Apes comic. And since the cool comic shop in Birmingham had a pile of those for sale, I thought it would be appropriate to buy the 47th and 48th issues, which reprinted the American Warlock #5 and admire the sole superhero-comic work of Ron Goulart!

Now, to be fair, I was only talking about 47th issues of American Marvel comics that time. The 47th issue of the UK Transformers comic was the first part of Dinobot Hunt, which was just wonderful. And the 47th issue of Planet of the Apes, ten years earlier, doesn't seem any better or worse than the usual standard of that comic. Especially if you're interested in seeing how Ron Goulart writes superheroes!

Apart from the front and back covers, the comic is entirely monochrome, but that works fine for Planet of the Apes - the American original version was also black and white, a magazine in more the style of British comics, with text features and things related to the TV show. The British comic gives us eight pages of apes, 11 pages of Captain Marvel and 11 pages of Warlock, because they had to ration the amount of available ape-material and pad the comic out with something else.

The Apes story, reprinted from the American Planet of the Apes #12, is rather good, actually. The art by Tom Sutton is very nice, benefitting from the black-and-white approach and telling a nice story by Doug Moench about a floating island city which in a previous uprising had been split into two communities, the previously ruling class of orangutans on one side, and the rebel gorillas on the other, with chimps as the working classes serving both. A masked saboteur is provoking a new war between the two sides. Those eight pages are worth the 8p price of the comic by themselves.

Which is probably for the best, because the Captain Marvel story, from the second issue of his series way back in 1968, is basically filler stuff. And the Warlock story that follows isn't, in all fairness, much good either.

So here's Adam Warlock! This one, of course, was originally in colour - the credit for the colourist (it was George Roussos) has been removed from the bottom of the page, meaning that letterer Artie Simek gets a bigger box than everyone else all to himself. And the title, The Day of the Death Birds, is a bit strange for this first half of the American comic - there's no mention of Death Birds until the final panel of the British reprint this issue.

But this reprint takes an interesting approach to colouring. Adam Warlock is 'golden-skinned', which with the limitations of American comic colouring meant that he was orange. Marvel UK in this issue makes Adam stand out by shading him grey in every panel.

Adam is currently on Counter-Earth, an exact duplicate of Earth on the opposite side of the sun, created by The High Evolutionary. Adam went off on his own at the end of the previous issue after the death of one of his young human friends, so Ron Goulart basically has a clean slate to work from. He wakes up from a cocoon the High Evolutionary had put him into for a rest and finds himself at the site of a planned underground atom bomb test right next to the San Andreas Fault. The Counter-Earth version of Doctor Doom, a noble scientist, warns the President that this will be a bad thing all round, but the evil President (who subsequently turns out to be Warlock's foe the Man-Beast in disguise, naturally) insists it has to go ahead.

So Adam Warlock spends this issue fighting the natural disasters caused by the explosion. The art isn't all that impressive, and it rather suffers from the loss of the colours. And then it turns out there's a stockpile of anti-personnel missiles, nicknamed Deathbirds, in a cave nearby, and of course they're set loose. Which will be continued next issue...

The inside back cover gives us a Warlock pin-up to stick on our walls if we really want to. I don't imagine many readers bothered with it.

And the back cover, telling us it's Midsummer Madness even though it's mid-September, promises that all of Marvel's comics next week will have a free mask on the back! And what's more, the inside back cover won't contain story pages! This was a regular complaint all through British comics of the eighties, so it's impressive to see that Marvel were able to do something about it as early as 1975! I'm certainly inspired to get the next issue!

The cover of this one is nothing to do with the story inside it, which doesn't feature any humans. It continues the orangutan/gorilla war story; ten pages of it this time. It's still good stuff.

This is followed by the letters page, in which one letter tells readers about the existence of an American Planet of the Apes fan club which the British readers can join, and the other tells readers about Planet of the Apes books that British readers can find in the shops. This is the kind of thing that happened in the world before the internet; people didn't know these things unless weekly magazines told them about it.

The fan club letter is from a "Miss Jackie Dunham", who had been told about it by her American pen pal. Miss Jackie really likes America. She goes on to say that Captain America is her favourite character in the Avengers and that "We have a kind of restaurant in Norwich called 'Captain America' and in it you get all American type food, e.g. Hamburgers etc." This is the kind of thing that happened in the days before McDonald's invaded British shores.

Warlock is promoted to the middle spot of this issue. Impressively, Marvel UK create a new splash page for this reprint of the second half of the story, using the cover of the American comic. It looks good! Adam Warlock and Professor von Doom are able to destroy the Deathbirds, and Adam finds the crowd of innocent bystanders worshipping him.

But then the evil President makes a TV broadcast to the nation announcing that the whole thing was Adam Warlock's fault! Which gives us a cliffhanger leading into the next issue. Whether what happens there is close to what Ron Goulart was intending is impossible to say, but this is the end of his sole contribution to the adventures of Adam Warlock, and indeed any comic not revolving around Cthulhu or William Shatner's TekWar (for which Goulart wrote the comic adaptation in the nineties, having also secretly been the ghost-writer of the original book).

And then we find out why they printed Miss Jackie Dunham's letter about the American fan club...

The attempt at a British fan club, which had been announced with some fanfare previously, has had to be abandoned because James Naughton and Ron Harper aren't answering their phones. Then comes a bit more of Captain Marvel battling the Super-Skrull, which to be fair is pretty good really. And the inside back cover, as promised, is devoted to an ad for an Airfix model kit. And the model in question, which British kids should have felt no compunction about cutting up a picture of, is Rommel's 'Greif' Half-Track. But on the other side is the promised mask!

Now you can go around looking like an ape, if you really want to!

So that's Ron Goulart's contribution to the world of British comics! It's a good job we've got those two rather good episodes of Thundercats to remember him by!