*Gro-o-o-an* Okay, from time to time Charlton did have good stuff buried amidst the dross. PAM westerns. Guest shots by Severin, Maneely, Williamson et al. Romance stories by talented Spanish and Mexican artists. But the majority of Charlton comics--hundreds, thousands of them--were like this one.
Scripts: Joe Gill at his worst. You can tell these things were banged out in a single draft. Meandering stories that change direction a couple of pages in, when Gill finally figures out how to end them. Generic dialogue. No sense whatever of character, time, motivation, anything. Like a pulp mag writer Gill likes to start his stories with his heroes in big trouble (see "His Own Kind") but he never gets round to telling us how they got into the jam in the first place. Too many of his stories, like "Good Will Ambassador," lack satisfying conclusions. They just sort of lumber to a stop on the last page. Speaking of "Good Will Ambassador," how about the sudden about-face on page 4? "You will die, Earth man. But in the meantime go down that stairway." Oh! Lookee here! An earth-like planet in the basement! "Yeah, the guys upstairs didn't mention it because they ignore us." So what happened to all the "our beautiful earth-like planet died, no oxygen left, blah blah blah" stuff?
Art: Bill Molno is the Joe Gill of comics artists. He never puts any thought or effort into anything. He fakes, cheats, and slops his way through story after story. He never rules a line, never cracks a reference book, and doesn't even bother to swipe from better artists. The best stories in the world--which these ain't--would pass unnoticed if this guy drew them. Rocco Mastroserio is a far better artist but he skates through this one. His figures are good but the backgrounds and hardware range from vague to nonexistent. That's important, because s-f comics are all about backgrounds and hardware. Unlike Molno, Charles Nicholas is a competent draughtsman. However his deadening sameness drives me nuts. The same faces with the same haircuts, the same poses, the same generic environments over and over and over.
"The Three Throgas of Threema" is weird. It sounds like it was written by a literate middle-schooler. It's not terrible, but it kind of wanders all over the map so when you reach the end you're unsure what the point was supposed to be. (The transposed lines didn't help.)
Sigh. There's something about Charltons that brings out the rant in me. Maybe it's significant that the still-active Charlton fan base acts as if the company began when Dick Giordano became editor, ignoring some three decades of stuff like this.
Badly-drawn thumbs DOWN!
Author
Topic: Week 125 - Space Adventures #49 (Read 5480 times)
