The Cathedral by Mantlo and Gal

'The Cathedral' by Bill Mantlo (writer) and Jean-Pierre Gal (artist)

'The Cathedral' was first published in the Spanish comic magazine Cimoc, issue 66 (1985), with an English translation reprinted in 1997 in the '20 Years of Heavy Metal' special issue.

Gal's artwork is just as brilliant as that which he did for the 'Conquering Armies' and 'Vengeance of Arn' comics.

 

Fallout 3000

Fallout 3000
by Mike Deodato Sr and Mike Deodato Jr
Caliber Comics, 1996

Since the late 1980s, Mike Deodato, Jr (b. 1963) has established himself as a well-known and successful comic book artist for major publishers, including DC and Marvel. But his first forays into writing and illustrating comic books came in his native Brazil, and his very first comic book was a black and white title called Year 3000, released in 1984.

In 1996 U.S. publisher Caliber Comics negotiated with Deodato, Jr to release seven of his Brazilian comic books in English, including Year 3000, which was retitled Fallout 3000.

Produced in conjunction with his father, Mike Deodato Sr,who wrote the comic, Fallout 3000 is an impressive artistic debut, all the more so considering that Deodato Jr was only 21 at the time. The story starts out on a post-apocalyptic note (with one of the more intense illustrations of a Rat Attack that I've ever seen !) before transitioning into a broader landscape of interstellar war.

Deodato Jr's artwork is reminiscent of that of Paul Neary in the Warren magazines of the 1970s in its innovative and striking use of full-page, collage-based compositions, chiaroscuro, and Zip-A-Tone. 

I've posted the entirety of Fallout 3000 below...........note that the original Caliber Comic book can be obtained, for a reasonable price, from online comic book vendors. 

Book Review: Candle in the Sun

Book Review: 'Candle in the Sun' by Robert Wells

1 / 5 Stars

‘Candle in the Sun’ (158 pp) was published by Berkley Books in June, 1971. The cover art is uncredited, but likely is by Paul Lehr.

Robert Wells (b. 1929) is a UK writer who published a number of sf novels in the 60s and 70s, including The Parasaurians (1969), Right-Handed Wilderness (1973), and The Spacejacks (1975).

‘Candle’ was a struggle to finish....I routinely gave up on reading it, only to reluctantly pick it back up again so I could complete this review.

The plot is straightforward: on an un-named colony planet, a flood of Biblical proportions forces the entire population to flee via ‘space arks’. The main character, Robert Gascon, is trapped by intelligent dolphins (?!) on the sea floor, and misses the evacuation. When he finally escapes captivity and reaches the surface, he discovers he is the last man left on the planet. He sets up a meager existence in a suite of rooms in one of the taller buildings protruding from the submerged ruins of the major city.

Gascon, by now partly deranged, spends his days sending out radio communications in the desperate hope of contacting someone still left on the planet. In the course of doing so, he receives a garbled answer from a woman named Clavelle. 

Elated, Gascon travels to a ruined subway station and gets aboard a still-functioning train, anticipating a rendezvous with Clavelle. Instead, he discovers that he has been abducted by the residents of Arcadia, a subterranean complex populated by the survivors of a crashed space ark.

Subjected to constant surveillance, Gascon must pretend to comply with the wishes of his captors, who – beset with mutations due to radiation – harbor a scheme to use him as the progenitor of a reborn human race, destined to live underground in perpetuity. Gascon uneasily participates in the scheme, but when the moment comes, he breaks for the surface - and freedom. 

But the Arcadians have no intention of giving up so easily…..

One of the reasons why ‘Candle’ is such a trying read is its prose style: author Wells uses an awkward combination of traditional pulp prose mixed with a self-conscious effort to adopt the 'modern' diction of sf’s New Wave writing.

This leads to frequent segments of clumsily rendered stream-of-consciousness text that is difficult to understand, and unrewarding to wade through. For example, early on in the novel, Gascon converses with a mutant; the two pages chronicling this conversation are made entirely up of text interspersed with ellipses. An example:

The eye opened and stared at Gascon, trying to remember. “I…will…show you a…quietthink…a thing…un…a…a”

“A secret ?”

“Ahh…hhh…Yes…a seacret ?”

Gascon is prone to talking to himself aloud, and he often gives vent to some of the more tortured outbursts I've ever read in the sf literature:

“I hope your reptile skins peel off and the sea boils you alive when it strikes up there !”

(addressing the intelligent dolphins who captured him)

“Scram, you bloody lepidopteric sheep !”

(addressing some mutants in Arcadia)

“Damned, poisonous, gut-rotting slime.”

(after eating a unique species of fungus)

“Come here, you damn beetle !”

(addressing still other mutants)

“Don’t tell me they built walki-talkie dolls that RUN on fruit !”

(addressing a robot)

A steady diet of these phrasings and literary contrivances make ‘Candle in the Sun’ a chore to read. You’re better off passing on this novel.

Heavy Metal magazine December 1985

'Heavy Metal' magazine December 1985

December, 1985, and in heavy rotation on MTV and on the FM radio is 'Broken Wings' by Mr. Mister, which was released in September of that year. The song made it to the number one spot on the Billboard pop chart in December.

The latest issue of Heavy Metal is out, with a cover by Ajin. Inside, editor Julie Simmons-Lynch announces that a 'new' Heavy Metal is debuting in January of 1986....

This 'new' Heavy Metal will be published only four times a year, on a quarterly basis. According to Simmons-Lynch, this change is necessary to provide readers with "....a bigger, more handsome, even more exciting quarterly edition....there will be no continued stories."

Readers with a less naive frame of mind might well conclude that given that moving to a quarterly publication schedule is something magazines do when their circulation and sales revenue fall to a level that cannot sustain a monthly schedule. Whether or not this is the case with Heavy Metal, one thing already has changed: the 'Dossier' section is absent in this December issue.

The good news about the December issue is that it features a great little strip by Caza, 'The Trial of Marlon Malone', which I have posted below.

Book Review: Epicenter

Book Review: 'Epicenter' by Basil Jackson

4 / 5 Stars

‘Epicenter’ first was published in 1971. This Berkely Medallion Books paperback version (223 pp) was published in January, 1973. The cover artist / designer is uncredited.

[Jackson, a Canadian author, wrote several other novels with a 'disaster' theme throughout the 70s, including ‘Rage Under the Arctic’ (1974), ‘Supersonic’ (1975), ‘The Night Manhattan Burned’ (1979), and ‘Spill !’ (1979).]

The novel is set in the early 70s. When an earthquake strikes eastern Canada, it affects refueling operations at the nuclear power plant in ‘Fairfield’, 20 miles east of Toronto. The tremors deform a chute, within which some spent fuel rods are being slid down into a waste tank in the lower section of the reactor building. The rods stick in the chute, a potentially dangerous development.

After some examination, the plant managers discover that the fuel rods are stuck in a portion of the chute that is accessible via a large panel. A plan is hatched to open the panel, and use a steel pole to poke at the stuck rods and free them. The attempt fails.

The management decides to employ a different tactic: dismantle the multiple layers of concrete shielding the area of the reactor core where the chute is located, and yank the rods out via crane. This is a more hazardous operation, but Richard Johnson, the plant’s chief engineer, gives the go-ahead.

Disaster strikes mid-way through the procedure. The core is exposed to the outside air, and radioactive particles are vented into the atmosphere. With Geiger counters reading exposure to potentially lethal amounts of radiation, Johnson orders the plant to be evacuated.

And soon, 250 square miles of Toronto will have be to evacuated, too….as a nuclear catastrophe unfolds over the unforgiving winter landscape of Ontario……

Basil Jackson did his research prior to writing ‘Epicenter’, and the result is a better-than-average nuclear disaster novel. For example, early in the narrative, a man is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation, and his demise is related in harrowing, but realistic, detail.

While the circumstances of the accident seem a bit contrived, the novel’s descriptions of mass evacuations, devastating fires, the exposure of the populace to hazardous quantities of fallout, and the strategy behind desperate measures to contain the radiation release, all have a high degree of plausibility and realism. 

To some extent, ‘Epicenter’ reflects the popularity of the ‘Airport’ novels, which were the forerunners in the late 60s and early 70s of what was to come to be known as the Disaster genre. In ‘Epicenter’ the emphasis throughout large sections of the novel is less on the technical details of the catastrophe, and more on the personal and psychological melodramas involving the lead characters.

When all is said and done, however, ‘Epicenter’ remains one of the better entries in the Nuclear Disaster sub-genre, and is worth picking up by those with a fondness for that category of sf / speculative fiction.