Issue 4

Let me say first that Colon outdid himself on the cover, which is one of the best I’ve ever seen, rivaling Perez or Byrne for gorgeous detail on a bejeweled frame that must have taken forever. Colon sometimes frames interior panels or whole pages non-diegetically, populating the margins with snakes or creepy faces simply to set the mood.

Amethyst discovers Citrina’s soulless body. In a surreal and cool sequence, a serpent slithers out of Citrina’s mouth, grows immense, and carries her away with tentacle rape overtones. She’s taken to Dark Opal’s palace, and the two have their first battle. Amethyst’s power ideas are limited to “force blast and shield,” but the more experienced Opal has all sorts of other tricks like shattering into a thousand pieces which grow into duplicates of himself. Citrina’s soul is freed during the battle. Amethyst calls that a win, and the crone and princess teleport to safety. Opal tries to grab Amethyst through the closing portal and loses his right hand for his trouble. This raises the stakes; our now-maimed villain now has extra motive to hit Amethyst where it hurts. Where might that be? Hmmm….

We begin to meet some other royal Gemworld houses, starting with Lady Emerald, whose teen daughter is being forced to move to Castle Opal. Carnelian is her escort, which is not a good sign. We also meet cutie Prince Topaz, who has not only flowing waist-length hair but also thick pigtails. Nobody really has enough hair to do that, but it's a metaphor for his romance-novel-cover masculinity. He somehow knows Amethyst is a “most beautiful woman,” claiming to have seen her at Fort Opal when she was Sardonyx’s prisoner, but I can’t find a scene like that in issue #1. (There are two humans looking down from a balcony on the captured Amethyst in issue #1, but Topaz is not one of them. I consider this just a goofed plot point; they lost the chance to include Topaz earlier, need him to know Amethyst now, so they just retconned him into that scene.) Besides, Topaz is already engaged to Lady Sapphire.

A cute li’l dinosaur (seen on the cover, but not actually a pet of Amethyst as implied) takes the amethyst fragment which Granch had left to be his guide last issue. Now Granch is lost in the belly of the beast, where he finds many of his monstrous brethren, rejected sons of Opal, in a scene straight out of Tartarus.

That would make sense; he's great working quickly at that level of detail, and he's involved in many future Amethyst covers either alone or collaborating with Colon.  The colorist also deserves kudos for all the detailed work on that frame.

Issue 5

Granch subdues his monster-brothers enough to drag them through a magic portal. Amy returns to Earth and attends English class, where a Gemworld portal opens on the ceiling, transforming her into her adult form; her clothing from here forward has a miniskirt with a golden border instead of the previous elastic bathing suit look. Granch and his brothers fall into the classroom. A brawl spills out into the schoolyard, where Amy’s parents encounter her in her adult form. Awkward! Amethyst incapacitates most of the brutes, and her mom talks one down before the cops have to shoot. The monsters join Team Amethyst.

Back at Fort Opal, the master of the house rapes his guest Princess Emerald off-panel, hoping to produce a magic-using heir, but she dies in the act. This is really dark for a Comics Code story! (The rape is handled subtly through indirect dialogue amongst seers at House Diamond, and I totally missed the significance of what they were saying when I read this as a kid, which is just as well.)

Over at House Topaz, the prince’s fiancée Lady Sapphire shows up, and Topaz’s dad tells him to shape up and quit mooning over Amethyst, with whom he so far has not exchanged a single word in his life. What a creep! (The prince, I mean.)

Special Amethyst Preview “Duel in Dark Magic” (April 1983)

Houston, we have a continuity problem. This sixteen page teaser preview was a bonus in the center of Legion of Super-Heroes #298. It did its job of attracting readers when Amethyst launched her own series the following month. It’s a really cool story, and they clearly allowed extra time for the art. However, it’s also impossible to place in continuity. The basic story is a raid on Fortress Opal by Amethyst and Granch to steal some magic water. The story clearly occurs after the first time Amethyst and Opal do battle (the end of issue 4), yet before Granch’s death and the loss of Carnelian’s hand (both at the end of issue 6). Yet at no point in that interval are Amethyst and Granch together on Gemworld. The two are separate throughout issue 4, are together only on Earth in issue 5, and never meet again after Granch and his siblings return to Gemworld at the end of issue 5. Oh well! It’s still a cool tale that introduces the three main bad guys plus Amethyst and Granch.

Some elements of the overall story and design were still in flux when this tale was concocted; Amethyst wears a diaphanous cape and skirt, a purple hairpiece with her hair pulled back instead of in bangs, huge dangling earrings, and an enormous bronze shoulderpiece that we never see again in the main series; she later adds thigh-high wader boots to her assemblage. Dark Opal has three creepy bird-women seers scrying for him in a large basin, and at one point they merge into a three-headed cockatrice to chase Amethyst. Carnelian has the gumption to sabotage Opal’s scheme, resulting in the gruesomely-depicted immolation of a smith who’s attaching the mystic gemstones to a breastplate. Opal actually ends up saving Gemworld by dissipating a destructive magic storm caused by the uncontrolled interactions of the gemstones on the breastplate.

Nice thread, rberman!

I bought this series eagerly because it was so very different from almost everything else DC or Marvel was selling during what for me seemed a very lean period. I loved that the original team stayed with the title, and that a young woman was the hero of the series as well. And I loved Colon's art. It was excellent, as was the writing, throughout the original run.

Can't remember if I followed it into its regular series. I may have felt it was more interesting as a finite series, but I'm not sure.

Interlude: DC Comics Presents #63: Superman and Amethyst

The Story: Carnelian is visiting Sardonyx in the desert. Amethyst attacks Castle Sardonyx, and Sardonyx opens a portal for Carnelian to flee to Earth. In a nice twist, Carnelian also is now thirteen years old, but with the mind of a 20 year old since he’s lived his whole life in Gemworld. Some super-villains sell him a robotic hand (to replace the hand he lost in issue #6 when his revolver exploded) for a bag full of gems. He lays hands (technically, hand and claw) on a piece of “experimental concentrated Kryptonite.” It transforms him into an adult, and he finds he has the magic powers that he lacked up until now. I guess Kryptonite is his birth stone, not actually Carnelian? Maybe?

Amethyst gives chase (and thus changes back to 13 years old) and finds she’s in Metropolis, with Superman flying overhead. She enlists his aid in finding Carnelian. Carnelian finds them first and, using Kryptonite-based magic (a double whammy for Superman) defeats his foes and kidnaps Amy back to Gemworld. She flings her Amethyst pendant away, which doesn’t bother Carnelian; now that he has magic powers, he apparently doesn’t care any more about Opal’s plan to collect all the gemstones. Superman uses the pendant to open a portal to Castle Amethyst, where he meets Citrina. Superman catches up to Carnelian, and Amethyst and gets back her pendant so she can counter Carnelian’s magic.  This is the first time that we see Amethyst use her own powers for anything besides portal forming, shields, and generic power blasts (see below picture).

Dark Opal is on his throne, trying to figure out the right “alignment” for twelve stones which he has arranged in a circle around another central stone. This seems to be a mistake because (1) there ought to be only twelve birthstones, not thirteen, and (2) A major plot point is that Opal doesn’t yet have an amethyst for his collection, so there should only be eleven. He realizes that the Super-Kryptonite (now residing in a compartment in Carnelian’s metal claw) is unstable and about to explode, so he confiscates it from his adopted son in the middle of battle with Amethyst and Superman. Superman grabs the Kryptonite (!) and flies through into our world, where he finds it’s now inert.

My two cents: DC Comics Presents was a Superman team-up title with different writers and artists for each issue. This issue was written by Mishkin and Cohn, with pencils by Alex Saviuk and ink by Colon, Bob Smith, and Gary Martin. As such, the art style is uneven from page to page; naturally the Colon-inked parts look most like the angular style of the Amethyst series. The notion of Carnelian finally getting a magic stone of his own (with the accompanying magic powers) is interesting, if poorly justified plotwise. There’s also no clear reason that he returns from Earth (where he’s already an adult thanks to the Super-K, but Amethyst is a helpless girl) to Gemworld (where Amethyst is also an adult), given that he declares his intention to break with Dark Opal, who rules Gemworld. Well, given his past behavior, there is one obvious reason he would bring Amy to the world where she's an adult, but the dialogue doesn't hint in that direction.

Amethyst doesn’t fit well into the regular DC Universe, and with her own series half-over, it’s an odd time for a team-up book to raise her visibility with readers. However, this issue explains the origin of Carnelian's claw hand, which figures prominently in future issues of the maxi-series, so it's an essential part of Amethyst continuity.