M.A.R.S. Patrol Total
War was one of the better comics that Gold Key put out in the late sixties
that wasn’t a licensed property, like The
Flintstones or Voyage to the Bottom
of the Sea. This comic, while well written and having good art, only lasted
for seven issues over the course of about three years.
The title was originally called just Total War, probably to capitalize on a popularity spurt of war
comics. The action centered on the Advanced Training Squad from the Marine
Attack Rescue Service. The squad was a
multicultural group that consisted of African-American communications expert Sgt.
Joe Striker, tank and weaponry specialist Corporal Russ Stacey, Asian-American underwater
combat expert Sgt. Ken Hiro and the team’s leader, combat pilot Lieutenant Cy
Adams. The highly-trained M.A.R.S. was under the leadership of General Kripps and had access
to the most modern of military weaponry and vehicles. The squad was on a 24-hour leave in a big city
when the metropolis was suddenly attacked by a very well-equipped and manned
military force. Over the course of the series, little was actually revealed
about the invaders; they were bald, hairless and had metals unknown to human
science. They also had various fantastic devices that were improved versions of
current weapons or systems on Earth. While it was implied that the invaders
were aliens, it was never actually revealed.
Given that M.A.R.S.
Patrol wasn’t published by one of the Big Two, there was a surprising
amount of decent characterization in the series, as several missions sent the
Squad back to the home region of several of the members: Striker returned to
his home in the Louisiana Bayou and Hiro met up with an old friend in San
Francisco’s Chinatown. You get a feeling of the horror of war as the United
States becomes one of the major battlefields in this global conflict.
Every issue but the final seventh one also had a
fully-painted cover, and the first two issues had artwork by comics’ legend
Wally Wood, the first I actually recall seeing in a Gold Key comic. All seven
issues are readily available in the various internet comic hubs, and I think
they are worth checking out for any war comics fan.
Now unlike M.A.R.S.
Patrol, it is kind of difficult to know what to think about Zody the Mod Rob. This was a comic
published in the middle of 1970, well after the supposed end of the Love
Generation. I’m not quite sure what the single published issue of this series
is trying to be; is it an Archie-style
teen comic? Is it a counter-culture humor title? I’m not saying that it is a
bad comic. It is actually quite well written for a “funny book” but it seems to
have been published in the wrong decade.
Randy Martin was trying to get on the staff of the Tinker
High Times newspaper, and was assigned to get a story from an eccentric
scientist named Professor Ipsof Acto, a man who didn’t know what his own
birthday was and was obsessed with horoscopes. Since Randy was an Aquarius,
Acto gave him his special Horoscope Cap to wear, which endowed Randy with a
level of prescience after he fell asleep outside wearing the device. Knowing
the future put a crimp in Randy’s life, so he built a robot and put the cap on
it. After a night being bathed in starlight through a skylight, the robot, named
Zody, started talking and acting strangely, proclaiming it had an IQ of 800.
The remainder of the tale dealt with Randy trying to deal with the
still-prophetic statements of Zody, who was given a wig to cover the cap and
dressed like a very thin hippie-stereotype.
The only thing that comes to mind after reading Zody the Mod Rob is DC’s legendary
stinker Brother Power, the Geek. Here
we have another attempt by a group of old white men trying to interpret a youth
movement without much of a clue as to what they were doing. In both cases, at
least there wasn’t a lot of vitriol and hidden agendas behind the attempts. Zody actually seemed to have some
potential as a series, but I think the lack of a real direction hurt it. It’s
like watching the first episode of My
Mother, the Car: It’s a mildly interesting concept when you get past the
blatant stupidity of the idea. Zody the
Mod Rob was about ten steps above that. This is another title that’s available
digitally from various sources on-line. One issue and ten minutes at the most
of your time is all it takes to give the entire saga a read.
Later this week, some reviews of some classic TV shows!
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