HEAVY MACHINERY

 

Thirty years after the publication of Theodore Sturgeon's original story, 1974 was a mad time for the Killdozer franchise, with an ABC TV-Movie of the week in February, and a Marvel tie in comic in April. To be fair, it's been pretty quiet on the Killdozer front since then, but I live in hope of a revival.

To set the scene: a rough-hewn set of construction workers are put on a deserted island to construct a runway. Their bulldozer becomes possessed by an alien intelligence, and goes on a kill crazy rampage. It gets very messy very quickly, and there is a lot of squishing.

My brother used to be a digger driver, he says stuff like this happens more often than you'd think.

STOP! HAMMER TIME

 

The comic book industry is nothing is not commercial, so the first Marvel tie in's came early. The Marvel Super Heroes was a 1966 syndicated cartoon featuring five of their superheroes, three of which (The Hulk, Iron Man and Thor) had debuted in Kirby & Lee's annus mirabilis, 1962 (Captain America and Namor, the Submariner had been knocking about since the 1940s).

Produced quickly and cheaply by Grantray-Lawrence Animation, the 'animation' took copies of art from the original comics, then added stiffly moving mouths, darting eyes, waving limbs and the odd mobile silhouette. You couldn't get away with it now, but the cartoons are short and bright and noisy and fast moving and must have seemed quite exciting to children at the time. I still like them now, but then, as we have already established, there is something wrong with me.

In 'The Tomorrow Man', the God of Thunder faces Zarrko, a megalomaniac villain from the 23rd century. It does not end well for Zarrko, or for Thor's half-brother, Loki, who, as usual, is stirring the shit behind the scenes with a big wooden spoon.

FUN ON THE RUN

 

From Planet Of The Apes #101

Highlighting the glib, hip, slightly cringey style of dialogue Marvel persevered with well into the 1980s. On page 2, our hero* Derek says '--it's time to make quick like a BUNNY!!' whilst thinking 'Lord knows where I found the flippancy...' or, indeed, why?

* I've never particularly cared for the human characters. I'm in it for the apes.

DEMONS OF THE PSYCHEDROME

Issue 94, week ending August 4th, 1976.

Obviously inspired by the incorporation of Dracula Lives into the Planet Of The Apes comic in issue 88, this cover gleefully ramps up the usually neglected gothic horror aspect of the series to exhilarating effect.

NOW RULE THE APES!

I have a more or less lifelong obsession with the original Planet of the Apes series. As a kid my regular fix of Ape Action was the UK version of the Marvel cash-in comic. Unlike its US counterpart, the UK comic was published weekly, so the British publishers soon ran out of source material and started making up their own stories, some of which were then reused by the Americans when they ran out.

I have many issues of this much-loved (but not particularly good) comic in my possession, so I'm going to share some of the covers with you,  starting with Issue 60, from the week ending December 13th, 1975. There's quite a lot going on with it.

The back cover of the issue is this rather ambiguous exclusive 'pin up' of the great Roddy McDowell. Roddy was a superb and underrated actor and, by all accounts, a  kind and lovely man, but is this the sort of picture anyone, particularly a child, would want hanging over their bed?

No, thought not.

ANGRY GREEN CASSANDRA

Poor Hulk.

THOR THING

Contemporary (well, 1966) cartoon adventures of the Norse God of Thunder. It's categorized as animation but, mainly, just the mouths move.