Buried Treasure: Star Hawks

On October 3, 1977, Star Hawks premiered as a new science fiction strip with a Sunday and daily format based on the adventures of Interplanetary Law Service officers Rex Jaxan and his partner Chavez as they battle interstellar criminals. Star Hawks combined the talents of renowned science fiction writer Ron Goulart and famed comic artist Gil Kane. In Gil's classic adventure strip style, he roughly based the look of Rex on a younger James Colburn and his robust friend on the bald-headed actor Victor McLaglen. The strip was also unique in introduced a two-tiered format to daily newspaper comics, effectively making each daily a mini Sunday in which Kane could experiment with lavish layouts. Unfortunately this new daily look also took more space as newspaper editors passed on the feature for other strips, until the Star Hawks dailies adopted the standard single-tier format. By the final days of the series, Archie Goodwin, Roger McKenzie, and Roger Stern, had taken turns writing the adventures, with Ernie Colon and Howard Chaykin finishing out the art chores. Running three and a half years, this fast paced feature with its monsters, robots, and space ships included some great villain cameos drawn to portray Issac Asimov, Dik Browne, and even Kane himself as the evil villain Smiler Tryce. In all there were one thousand two hundred and fifty two strips and Kane won best story strip from the National Cartoonist Society for 1977, before the saga ended on May 2, 1981.

Atlas/Seaboard Comics: The Brute

Some think that Atlas Comics monster book, The Brute, was just a crude imitation of the original savage origins of Marvel's green Goliath, The Incredible Hulk, here recast as a blue savage Neanderthal caveman.  This curious choice of a cannibal “hero” was a savage ape man, suddenly frozen during the Ice Age, who slept in a moving glacier until an atomic power plant awoke him in modern times. This beast retreats to a cave surviving on scrawny rats until three young cave explorers stumble upon him by accident...and two become his next dinner. One of these lucky kids escapes and alerts the authorities, as the Brute is captured by an entire police force, brought to trial, and put in a sympathetic woman anthropologist’s care. But as we suspect, the Brute escapes, runs amok and murders more townsfolk in its three issue short-lived series. Michael Fleisher's creepy first two issues were illustrated by the talented Mike Sekowsky highlighted by the moody inks of Pablo Marcos. Gary Friedrich was chosen to script the final issue with Alan Lee Weiss doing the art chores on this unusual book. I never saw the Hulk connection but do see the similarities to a 1970 B movie and the last film for star Joan Crawford. Here is the motion picture's synopsis. Anthropologist Dr. Brockton unearths in a local cave a troglodyte (an Ice Age 'missing link" half-caveman, half-ape) and manages to domesticate him...until he's let loose by an irate land developer to go on a rampage and kidnap a little girl. Sound familiar, just a few slight changes and you have Seaboard's ,The Brute, but it was fun all the same.

Foreign Favorites: El Capitan Trueno

One of the most famous features in Spanish comics, El Capitan Trueno, "Captain Thunder" hit the stands in June of 1956 written by Victor Mora and illustrated by Miguel Ambrosio Zaragoza. A warrior of honor who defended the traditional ideas of chivalry, Capitan Trueno was a contemporary of Richard the Lion-Hearted and Saladin. His vast knowledge and fortune did not stop this fearless fighter from protecting the weak and ending tyrannical reign over the common man, with the help of his two constant companions. At his side in these many adventures that covered 618 comic appearances, and 232 Pulgarcito magazine features was his trusted squire Crispin, and the big hearted giant, Goliath. The trio wandered the world, righting wrongs and fighting terrible monsters of every description. Mora's quick scripts combined humor with action, romance and fighting, as idyllic scenes alternated with brutal battles. This proved to be  the perfect formula for Zaragoza's (under his pseudonym, Ambros) dynamic graphics, coupled with those beautiful Antonio Bernal covers. After ending in March of 1968, the series was reprinted, later in full color. Adapted into novels, advertising campaigns, and numerous toys and premiums, El Capitan Trueno lives on in the memory  of dedicated comic fans around the world.