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2009: A comic-book space odyssey
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Can space comics blast off?
What is the fascination the two biggest comic-book companies have with outer space?
For the last two years or so, DC has been churning out adventures featuring its space heroes - Adam Strange, Comet, Hawkman, the Omega Men - and even a few characters, like Animal Man, who have very little to do with the outer reaches. Not to be outdone, Marvel appears to have just jumped on the bandwagon, staring up a series it calls "War of Kings," in which various alien races - Inhumans, the Kree, the Skrulls - are likely to duke it out.
What's wrong with a little space travel? Nothing really - except for the fact that these tales tend to be epic in nature, rather than focusing on a few characters and their travails on an episode by episode basis.
Why? I have to point back to Marvel's 1970s-80s adventures in which would-be dominators of the universe threatened Earth, prompting the publisher's popular Avengers team to join forces with other alien races and take to the stars to prevent galaxicide, or whatever you might want to call it. Blame Jim Starlin, one of the best known writers of these sorts of tales, who has also been penning some of the recent DC work.
Where the old stuff from the 70s and 80s remains some of the hallmarks of the genre, the stories we've been seeing from DC have been execrable, filled with silly stories with no real resolution, and little bearing on the rest of the DC universe of comic books. Marvel's new "War of Kings," however, has started off in promising fashion; the trouble is, I'm not inclined to follow the adventure across four different comic-book series after I've shelled out so much in the last year or so on the publisher's "Secret Invasion" series and the economy's so bad.
Here's hoping the genre blasts off despite these various challenges. From Tommy Tomorrow and Captain Comet to Adam Warlock and Captain Marvel, space comics have a long history in the industry; we just need to see if someone can get them right in 2009.
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