From 1979 through to 1991 D. C. Thomson & Company, Limited published 281 issues of a small format comics anthology called Starblazer. It was never as successful or as widely read as Commando, which I also used to collect, but the science fiction nerd inside me preferred Starblazer. For no other reason than the thought crossed my mind today I’ve decided to hunt down covers of the magazine from that there internet machine that I remember owning and reading.
One of the first images I spotted and recognised was this from issue 15, Algol The Terrible. I confess I couldn’t quite remember what the plot of the story was but if you click on the image to follow the link you’ll see a great summary from Philip Sandifer.
Via the comments on this io9 article (on Spanish pulp magazine covers, bizarrely) comes Nightmare Planet.
Again, no recollection of the plot but if the cover is anything to go by – and with Starblazer comics that’s frequently not the case at all – then there’s a planet involved which has all manner of nastiness on its surface.
The next load of photos I found via a post on Monster Brains – Starblazer – which led me to the Flickr photostream of Aeron Alfrey and the Starblazer album.
To reiterate, I’m only going to include ones I remember having. I’m also going to explain the story’s plot in each case based solely on the artwork and/or title. There’s a chance this won’t be accurate.
Robot Rebellion, the story of a rebellion… by robots! Or maybe just one robot. The title isn’t clear on that matter but what is apparent is that there’s no nobility in robot rebellions and shooting your fellow artificial lifeforms in the back is considered just fine. Isaac Asimov would have a fit if he saw this.
The Drifters of Darga are an alien species that float across the surface of their planet making high-pitched noises (helium, you see) and helping adventurers who find themselves trapped in the local foliage. Because of their unfortunate skin patterns they’re considered terrifying by visitors. The story is a classic “don’t judge a book by its cover” tale which is precisely what I’m doing. I’ll never learn.
The Machine Master is a simple story of slavery only with a master who is a machine, incapable of caring for its labour force. Despite this, the workers love the machine because the planet they’re working on has a higher-than-usual concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere. Light-headed japes and frequent fires fill the pages of this comic.
The sand people from Star Wars make an appearance in the Starblazer franchise with this charming account of their attempts to rebrand as the Overlords of Oltair, that planet’s first (and last) dog-walking company.
Nowhere World is the nickname given by outsiders to an otherwise unpronounceable planet populated entirely by the alien species that frequently travelled to Earth terrorising Edvard Munch and inspiring his most famous piece of art, The Scream. Centuries later Munch’s descendants use the sale of of his art to build a robot and send it to the planet for a little bit of payback.
Following a robot uprising over their human creators the mechanical marvels decide to set up a democratic system and proceed to campaign, vote for, and elect a King Robot. A better name would have been President Robot but the story’s author wasn’t well-versed with how monarchies and democracies differed.
When the gravity enforcers on the galaxy’s premier penal planet for winged criminals fail the Prisoners of Zorr take to the skies and try to find a way off the surface. Can two plucky prison guards thwart their plans? In a word: no. Contains thirteen pages of some of the finest disembowelling seen in comics.
An old alien promises young men – and only young men – that he will reveal to them the secret of long life and power on board his orbital space station. The young men soon realise that all that awaits them is pain in a place they soon come to call The Ring of Terror.
An alien civil war reenactment group engage in a series of sales and sponsored events in order to fund the manufacture of a citadel that was the scene of a pivotal battle, the Siege at the Towering Turbulence. They look quite proud of it.
The Promised Planet is the destination for a fleet of space pioneers on their centuries-long trek through the stars. Upon arrival the world they christen New Australia turns out to be as full of things trying to kill them as the country it is named after and the pioneers are forced to adopt nasal voices and upward inflections just to survive.
Built by a warfaring species as Robots of Death an accidental firmware update gives the machines a sense of aesthetics and they turn to arc welding modern artwork representations of ancient Egypt for a reason never actually explained.
Sinister City is home to left-handed people, outcasts on a world that considers the trait a sign of devilry. After an electrical fault on his personal spacecraft causes the planet’s right-handed emperor to crash into the city he soon learns that the sinister, ostracised people are no different from anyone else; capable of love, tears, prejudice, and extreme torture. Following his death the city is nuked from orbit.
Cashing in on the runaway success of Barbara Woodhouse Planet Tamer follows the exploits of a man with no name on a rocket sled with fearsome weaponry as he travels around wild planets training the beasts of the land to beg for food and roll over on command. Through a series of flashbacks in the comic strip it soon becomes apparent that he does these things because he fell out of a tree and hit his head as a child.
Grunggh is an adolescent and so desperate to escape the clutches of his parents he enlists on a ship that takes him to the Andromeda galaxy. Unbeknownst to him, though, the eyes of his mother are never far away and when her drone ship spots Grunggh watching porn through his ship cabin’s porthole all hell breaks loose in something that becomes known in the family as The Andromeda Incident.
In another tie-in with the popular Star Wars franchise of movies Lords of the Wilderness is a cautionary tale with an ironic title that explores what happens when Tauntauns are taken from their normal, icy climate and put to work on a desert planet; they die, quickly and noisily.
A mercenary known everywhere as the Cosmic Killer has a weakness for gold medallions and is lured to a planet made mostly of marmalade in search of the fabled Golden Duke. A sticky situation awaits him.
A trade dispute regarding squid fishing rights leads to a Siege of Seabed City by the fishery union and nearly eighty pages of negotations before an agreement is reached for a percentage decrease in taxation on the mandated reduced quota plus extended benefits for life partners of the fishermen and women.
A modern art knitting project on a galactic scale that is known informally as The Web of Arcon after its enigmatic creator soon becomes the cause of a number of lawsuits owing to accidents in Arcon’s solar system. The artist sadly takes his own life when it becomes clear he will be found guilty for gross negligence. In a horrible twist he is cleared of all charges.
Patrol ship R-102 is sent into deep space to investigate a mysterious craft that has appeared and which sports the galaxy’s largest lava lamp decoration. When it arrives R-102 realises that the strange vessel is a disco pleasure cruiser which leads to R-102 designating it a Hell Ship on account of its preference for Irish folk.
She’s the architect that every planet wants to help design their cities but what is the mysterious Secret of Soma? It turns out that it’s domes. People really like domes.
After a giant ship appears over the skies of London and shoots off the hands of Big Ben the call is put out to Abandon Earth. Decades later as the evacuation fleet is passing Pluto someone asks if perhaps somebody shouldn’t have tried destroying the clock-attacking ship instead of everyone just running away like they did. By the time the people of Earth return the invader has vanished, all the clocks everywhere have been rendered useless, and it is centuries before the newly-repopulated planet can schedule meetings properly.
The Doomsday Machines is an aggressively-titled comic book version of the classic science fiction novel The Crabonauts Conquer The Stars which limits itself to the chapter where the aforementioned Crabonauts engage in planet-wide landscape gardening to earn star petrol money.
The Moonstealers suffer a series of setbacks when the moons they’re tasked with stealing explode as they’re being appropriated for their clients. Is there a traitor in the company or is a rival stopping at nothing to make sure their business suffers even more in a period of galactic economic downturn? Or is it just a risk that comes with trying to steal moons made of nitroglycerin?
She’s the Battlecraft Starstrike, a Neptune class Star Intruder and flagship of the Galactic Imperium, and she’s the craft you want when there’s a daring mission called for. The cover displays the impressive Hyperwarp into the atmosphere of a rebel moon moment, a familiar scene for anyone who watched the reboot of Battlestar Galactica and that ship’s identical manoeuvre above New Caprica. Sadly, in the comic everyone on board dies when they’re slammed into the ceilings of the ship as it plummets through the air leaving Starstrike to attempt to complete subsequent missions on its own, slowly going mad because there’s nobody around to mop up the crew littering its innards.
A deadly beam of energy destroys his home world leaving Aaron Zebedee alone in space on his pleasure craft vowing revenge on whoever triggered what he names in his diary The Planet Cracker. Sadly, his craft has limited range and supplies and Aaron only survives for ten days. The source of the beam is never revealed.
Responding to an unsolicited electronic mailing offering cheap lunar tree seeds the captain of the space freighter Magellan picks up the cargo he foolishly orders only to find it contravenes interplanetary trading laws. Incarcerated in a Bubble of Punishment the captain decides to write his memoirs which he titles The Seeds of Doom. It becomes a bestseller and he switches career to novelist upon his release.
In a cruel twist of fate the people of Blindworld, all of whom are blind as their planet’s name implies, have a natural ability to design and build the most beautiful starships in the known universe. The comic is mostly a series of short stories of alien species ordering great-looking space vessels and expressing astonishment that the builders can’t see how nice they look.
In the future everything will be the same except it will take place in space and in spacesuits, and this simple truism is displayed wonderfully in Rigel Express, a tale of trainspotting… in space! Expect all the excitement of spotting space trains including taking down the space train numbers, checking space timetables, and the difficulties of drinking from space Thermos flasks.
As the caption on the cover of Terror Planet says “alien cities in the ten-mile high trees hid the most ruthless killers in the galaxy.” What isn’t so clear but can be surmised is that these cities also hide a governing body desperate to cling on to imperial measurements. The deadly combination can only lead to one thing: bureaucratic turmoil when alien squirrels start hoarding the killers’ skull trophies.
The Triangle of Terror starts off as a mystery story investigating disappearances of spaceships in a zone of space between three star systems but it soon becomes clear that the title and story is one large euphemism warning about women. Like Starblazer readers needed that.
The final set of pictures are scans that are a little smaller and of not so great quality, all coming from Comic Vine:
Tarquin Haemophilia IV is the last Lord of Jarkness in this surprisingly sad story that takes place on the day he inherits the family starship and takes a walk in space without his helmet. That’s what millenia of inbreeding does for you.
An accident in space ends up with a sporty space vessel embedded in the side of a battlecruiser and the pilot escaping in an emergency teleporter because he’s got no insurance. Battlecruiser Revenge follows the battlecruiser’s insurance company’s attempt to track down the pilot through the court system.
The Pirates of Vega III is a space-based comedy following a movie production company as they try and fail to get backing to make a sequel to the wildly successful Pirates of Vega and the less successful Pirates of Vega II: Galactic Boogaloo.
The Slaveship of Simala runs into trouble when one of the slaves in the galley falls into the transwarp cabinet triggering a jump into an alternate universe where space is red and moons really are made of cheese. With the crew lactose intolerant and their uniforms clashing with the universe an alliance with their slaves will need to be made if they’re to ever escape back to normality.
After it is attacked by pirates for its cargo of marsupials the freighter Silver Service Sunshine sends a distress call that is answered by aliens. Will the xenophobic freighter captain accept the offer of Alien Contact or will his prejudice lead to the aliens saying “Well, fuck you then, die in space, see if we care arsewipe!” in a shocking final panel in the comic that somehow slipped past the censors when it was published? You’ll have to read it to find out!
Mike Starstreaker has great skin, full lips, and a bitching wardrobe. But he’s also got an itchy trigger finger which leads to him being the Last Man on Earth. As loneliness grips him Mike turns to masturbation and goes partially blind. His death comes when he mistakes his foggy reflection for a stranger and shoots a laser at himself.
Well-meaning scientist Dr Kate Asteroid devotes her life to inventing a weapon that will reverse the deadly power of the Negatronic Cannon in use by raiders across the seven star systems. She has an epiphany when she realises the problem with her Positronic Cannon and its equally destructive power comes from the fact it’s still a cannon.
A quest takes place for a fabled world known only as The Lost Planet. The amazing twist in the story is ruined by the image of Earth on the cover.
There is a saying that goes “The Seas of Samor run red with the blood of the unwary” but this is revealed to be a public relations ploy to divert attention away from the unending jam spill from the Samor Preservatives Factory in what is ultimately a tale about corporations not taking responsibility for their accidents.
When the planet of Stonerollingia III pays for intergalactic rock group The Immortals to perform at the annual Worldfest Concert it discovers to its horror that the musical group’s name comes from its members’ inability to die, a talent that derives from the lead singer’s abuse of homeopathy.
Besieged on all sides by a nameless alien force utilising tactics they can’t combat the newly-colonised world of Mamiamia manages to slip a small force through the enemy lines in search of assistance from the phenomenal genius held in the Mind of Meredith Morgan. After a series of encounters the force find the reclusive brain only to discover it is a loaf of bread on top of an ancient reel-to-reel tape deck. Meanwhile Mamiamia falls to the aliens and everyone is eaten.
March 5, 2015
Well, that takes me back. Definitely a lot better than Commando comics too. I’m not entirely sure I remember those stories quite like that ;D but it’s given me the urge to see if I’ve got any still hanging around in the loft.