Has Bill Mantlo ever spoken about the similarity between Steranko's key and his own "Key to the Microverse" plot line in late 20s/early 30s issues of The Micronauts?

Marvel Super Special #18, Raiders of the Lost Ark



Amazing cover by Howard Chaykin!

Sometime, around 1980-81, I was in a theater and saw this teaser, for an upcoming movie...



I didn't know what the heck was going on, but I knew I wanted to find out. I soon bought the novelization and this Super Special, long before I finally got to see the movie.

Creative Team: Walt Simonson-writer, John Buscema-pencils, Klaus Janson-inks, Rick Parker-letters, Michelle Wolfman-colors, Archie Goodwin-editor.
That's a hell of a team, with Jo Duffy assisting Archie. This also represents an early writing gig for Walt.

Synopsis: 1936, Peru, a white man leads two Latinos and 5 Quecha natives. They walk through the jungle until the come to an ancient temple, hidden by jungle growth. The natives become agitated and run off.



The white man asks for the other half of a map, then suspects treachery. His bullwhip makes short work of one of his companions, one of the Latinos, who flees after attempting treachery. the other swears no knowledge and they enter the temple, wary of boobytrap. A shaft of light proves to hae a trigger that releases spears, where the man finds a dead competitor. They cautiously make their way past the trap and others, eventually coming to a treasure chamber, with a golden idol. Caution proves prudent, when tapping a tile releases blowdarts. The man in the leather jacket makes it across and then fills a sack with sand, exchanging it for the golden idol. then, the sacks causes the stone underneath to sink and a rumbling occurs. the men flee and use the whip to swing across a pit. The Latino has the whip and tells the white man to throw him the idol and he will throw the whip. The white man does and his partner drops the whip and leaves him to his fate. The man jumps the chasm and catches vines and pulls himself up. He runs ahead of a massive rolling boulder and gets out just ahead of it...



Outside, he finds a pack of Jovito natives, led by a Belgian, named Belloq. Belloq takes the idol. While he is distracted, the American makes a break for it and gets to a float plane, narrowly escaping his fate.

The man is Indiana Jones, treasure hunter and professor of archeology. Back in the US, he laments the loss of the idol to friend Marcus Brody. Brody tells him there are government men wanting to see him. he meets them and they share intelligence intercepts of telegrams from a german dig in Egypt, mentioning Tanis, and asking to locate a Prof Ravenwood. Jones exlains that Tanis was a city where the Ark of the Covenant was taken and buried, then the city was buried in a sandstorm. Ravenwood was the foremost authority and Indy;s mentor. he takes on a commission to find ravenwood and obtain the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, which when used in a map room, will point to the location of the Ark. Indy goes to Tibet to find Ravenwood and runs into his daughter, Marion, Indy's former lover. She offers to sell him the piece, if she can find it. Meanwhile, a German agent, Toht, arrives to obtain the piece and is going to torture the whereabouts out of Marion, until Indy returns and fights his men, starting a fire which burns down the bar. marion had the piece around her neck and sat it on the bar. toht tries to pick it up, but it has been heated by the fire and he burns his hand. Marion and Indy get it and leave, with Marion demanding to be an equal partner. they head for Egypt.



In Egypt, they meet up with Sallah, an old friend of Indy's and an experienced digger for archeological excavations. Sallah has been working for the Germans, who are led by Belloq and tells Indy they have found the map room. he says he will take Indy to someone who can interpret the writing on the headpiece. Indy and Marion go off to a bazaar and are attacked by Arabs and Germans. they split up and Marion hides in a basket and is carried off. Indy gives chase, but the basket is put on a truck which overturns and blows up.



Sallah takes Indy to a wise man, who tells them another had the same piece. They are crestfallen, as the Germans have a copy, but learn that there are markings on both sides and the German one only had them on one side. The Germans missed a part about taking away measurements fromt he height of the staff to honor the Hebrew god; so, their staff is made too tall and the map will show them the wrong location. Indy and Sallah are overjoyed as they can find the real location. Sallah stops Indy from eating a date when he notices a dead monkey, surrounded by date pieces and pits.

Indy goes into the maproom, disguised as an Arab and puts in his staff and headpiece, where the shining sun reveals a location. he makes calculations and takes notes. he leaves the chamber and must hide from the Germans, ducking into a tent, where he finds Marion, alive, bound and gagged.



Indy realizes he has to leave Marion there or the whole camp will be alerted to his presence. Indy and Sallah go off to their site and begin digging, eventually finding the Well of Souls, the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant.



The chamber is filled with dangerous venomous snakes (and constrictors that weren't indigenous to Egypt) and they must clear a path, to remove the Ark. Belloq spot strange lightning in the distance and investigates and finds Indy and traps him there, dumping in Marion to keep him company. They are sealed in, but Indy is able to topple a statue and burst through a wall to tunnels behind, which they follow to the outside, near a German airfield...



They go to steal back the Ark and Indy fights a mechanic, near a flying wing aircraft. The plane is exploded and Indy and Marion hide and find Sallah. they spot a convoy leaving, with the Ark. Indy chases on horseback, leaps onto a truck and is knocked off, but hangs on underneath, makes his way to the rear, and climbs back over the top, taking over the truck.



Indy and Marion, with Sallah's aid, get the crate with the Ark onto a freighter and set sail, ahead of the Germans. On the ship, Marion tends to Indy's wounds and....other needs. Later, the ship is stopped by a German U-Boat and boarded. Indy hides and Marion is captured and removed, as is the Ark. Indy goes over the side and swims to the U-Boat, as it submerges to periscope depth. Indy lashes himself to the periscope, with his whip...



The sub goes to a hidden sub pen, on a small island. Indy sneaks off and hides. The Germans build a stage and altar and tie Marion to a stake. Belloq emerges in a copy of Hebrew robes.



Indy turns up with a panzerfaust rocket launcher and threatens to destroy the ark; but, is captured by German soldiers. he is tied to the stake, with Marion, as a ceremony commences and Belloq opens the Ark. Spectral shapes emerge from the Ark and lightning destroys lamps. Belloq finds his face melted and the Germans are all killed, with only Marion and Indy surviving, their eyes clamped shut. The Ark is brought to the US, where the government locks it away, instead of handing it over to the museum. Marion consoles Indy as they leave the government offices and the crate is parked in a warehouse....



The cast is listed on the back inside cover and a collage of scenes on the outer side...



Thoughts: Walt, John and Klaus do a bang up job, adapting the film script and condensing things down. Since they were working from the script, they didn't know about some of the memorable action scenes, many of which were concocted late in filming. As such, they don't replicate them. Thus, we do not see Indy fighting the swordsman by just shooting him, nor do we see the truck stunt, as Indy just jumps aboard, ejects the driver, and drives the Germans off a cliff. The comic shows Toht in the car, yet the film has both he and Dietrich (Wolf Kahler) at the ending ceremony. The scene of Indy lashing himself to the periscope was in the script and was shot, but cut from the film...



The likenesses are fairly generic, suggesting they didn't have the rights to make them more exact. Buscema draws Marion a bit curvier than Karen Allen. Near the climax, the comic has Indy subdued by german soldiers; in the film, Belloq calls his bluff and he lowers the rocket launcher and surrenders. the launcher is supposed to be a panzerfaust...



What Harrison Ford is actually holding is a Russian RPG-7 rocket launcher tube, with a dummy rocket inserted...





The submarine model used in filming was actually the model used for the German mini-series/film Das Boot. The sub pen scene was shot on the same set as used in Das Boot, which was at the site of the German subpens at La Rochelle, in Occupied France...



Spielberg had wanted to direct James Bond, but had been rejected by Cubby Brocolli, before Jaws was a hit. Lucas wanted to do a throwback to the old republic serials, with a swashbuckling treasure hunter/archeologist. Together, they concocted Indiana Jones, the name coming from Lucas pet Malamute dog, Indiana, and CL Moore's sci-fi hero, Northwest Smith, who was an inspiration for Han Solo (and the film Nevada Smith).Specific scenes were taken from various movies: the flying wing from War of the Worlds (though that film used footage of an actual Noprthrop YB-49) inspired the use of a flying wing by the Germans, the fight on and around the flying wing was based on a similar scene in Spy Smasher, the truck stunt was an homage to Yakima Canutt's famous stunt in Stagecoach, and its re-enactment and expansion in Zorro's Fighting Legion; the temple scene with the idol and the map room were both cribbed from the Charlton Heston film Treasure of the Incas, Indy's look was taken from Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Treasure of the Incas, the rolling boulder was from Uncle Scrooge comics, the whip from various Zorro films and serials, the leap onto the truck from King of the Texas Rangers, the government warehouse from Citizen Kane...and so on.

Many scenes were improvised on set, which is part of why they do not appear in the adaptation or why the scene plays differently in the comic.

Buscema does a fine job with the action and this type of material was more to his liking. However, I can't help but wish that Walt was doing the artwork, or Chaykin. Walt was a bit more dynamic in his staging (Buscema handles the action well, but is a bit overwhelmed by text and number of scenes). I would have loved to have seen Archie handle the script, with Walt doing the art or Howard Chaykin, as this was right up both their alleys (Walt with Manhunter and some of his war comics, Chaykin with Dominic Fortune and his space opera stuff). Walt does a good job capturing the story, probably with pointers from Archie. Buscema feels a bit restrained, to me, in this, compared to either Conan or his Tarzan work. Maybe it was the density of the work.

Raiders was a huge hit, spawning its own film series and imitators and an Indiana Jones comic series, at Marvel, would follow, with John Byrne handling m,any stories. Later, Indy passed over to Dark Horse, after Star Wars, where they did some more pulp-inspired tales.

Next time, Chaykin moves from cover to interiors, as he gets to take a crack at some James Bond. Unfortunately, he gets to do it with Vince Coletta inking. Come on back for Marvel's adaptation of For Your Eyes Only, one of Roger Moore's better films.

I had that Marvel Super Special and the three issue comics version.

Byrne spoofed Indy in FF #241:

Marvel Graphic Novel #51, Punisher: Intruder



How exactly does Punisher hold up those ammo pouches at his waist? There is not belt buckle and they would be sagging under the weight, if sewn onto his costume. Given that he rarely reloads, and the pouches are the wrong size and shape for Uzi magazines or for an assault rifle, just what does he have in there? Snacks?

Creative Team: Mike Baron-writer, Bill Reinhold-artist, Willie Schubert-letters, Linda Lessman-colors, Carl Potts-editor.

So, I take it the story will be a liberal, anti-gun message? Well, maybe when they get Joyce Babner to write a story, edited by cat yronwode (though cat was fine with gunplay in Scout and Airboy).

Synopsis: Nobody notices Frank Castle on a water tower, in a small village, in Illinois, conducting recon on a drug pusher. Someone hits the house next to the one that Punisher is observing and he , somehow, fires a line across, using a rifle, and slides down a zip line, while his weaponry lays underneath the maintenance platform of the water tower.



The homeowner is dead, shotgun by his side, as is his wife. Punisher finds their little girl and takes her out of there, after she gets her Raggedy Ann. She says she wants to become a cleaner. Oh, wait, that was Leon, the Professional. Micro has intel on a secret CIA appropriation in the Navy budget, a private security firm and an ex-Navy aviator who is a martial arts champion and graduate of Fighter Weapons School (Baron calls it Top Gun School, since he has only seen the stupid movie, but didn't pay attention to the sign at the school) and that the pilot was attached to the USS Coral Sea. He isn't a veteran of the Korean War, yet has two kills of North Korean pilots. (There have been incidents; but, shooting down planes? In the 70s? Come on Mike!) He's also involved with a Korean reverend, Moon Teck-Yo (wonder where Mike came up with that name.......

+
....)

Col Whittaker and his people did the hit and are hunting the girl, using milk cartons (which had become a thing, by then). The Reverend is bankrolling (with the CIA) a fortress for a war on Communism and drug trafficking...



Cute; a mountain carved into an aircraft carrier....no one would ever spot that. Even GI Joe wasn't this over-the-top!

Micro locates the base, via tapping the KGB's computers, at the Soviet Embassy. Castle hides the kid in a nunnery, with forged orders from the Pope. The Mother Superior buys into this because nuns don't ask hard questions.

The fortress is said to be in Utah and runs missions into Costa Rica (Costa Rica wasn't exactly a hotbed of guerrilla activity, which is why so many gringos go there to live). They have an F-14, an A-7 (which had been retired by then) and three "slicks" (UH-1H Huey transport helicopters, not gunships). Castle goes to practice in a flight simulator and we are led to believe he hopped rides with Martine pilots and soloed in an F-105, but nothing official. Um, yeah, and that isn't the same as flight school. This isn't a Cessna.

An Air Force F-5, with Navy markings, has trouble over Chicago and the pilot, whose call-sign is Badger (in-joke) ejects and the plane crashes into the Romida hotel, where a senator has taken over the top floor. The senator, a leading candidate for the post of Attorney General, is killed. The Col is behind it. He has also intercepted a drug shipment meant for the escaped pusher and is going to sell it, under his religious backer's nose. The senator was too liberal for the colonel and he plans another political hit.

This is 1989 and we are expected to believe that a "wishy-washy liberal" is a leading candidate for the US Attorney General, under the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush. Did Mike Baron suddenly join the La Rouche wingnuts?

Oh, the bad guys also have an A-6 Intruder, for those keeping score.

Castle infiltrates the fortress, moving right past an anti-aircraft gun emplacement. So, no civilian radar picks up the aircraft flights and no one noticed a massive complex being carved out of solid rock, in Utah, with large artillery pieces put in place, a radar mast, and a runway and catapult being built.

He sneaks through Navarone and avoids Gregory Peck and David Niven. he discovers the planned hit on the next AG target and acts. he gets caught, cuffed and interrogated and he is found wearing his SS jammies underneath the stolen uniform. He gets to fight the Colonel, with hands cuffed. He is booked to lose and goes down and is dragged off. He is tortured by a plastic bag over his head and some urine, for good measure. he beats it. he keeps flashing back to the seminary, when he trained for the priesthood. Uh-huh. He is having a crisis of faith and thinking of leaving. he returns to the present and tells the torturer about the drugs and claims he has 100 men about to hit the installation. The torturer lets him loose and he snaps his neck as only Hollywood can. he steals the A-7 and drops its bombload on the flightdeck, then engages in a dogfight with the colonel, a trained pilot, graduate of the elite Fighter Weapons School, combat experienced, and flying an F-14 Tomcat fighter plane, which has greater speed and range than the A-7, is more maneuverable, and can fire it's Phoenix missiles from 25 miles away and hit the target. So, of course, castle wins...



Punisher returns to the convent and finds his old mentor, the real priest there (he used his name) and that the girl was removed, because the nuns weren't stupid. She has been placed with a neighbor who wanted to adopt: the drug trafficker.

Cue Twilight Zone music...

Thoughts: Confession: I hate the Punisher. It's a cheap rip-off of Mack Bolan, the Executioner, but he worked better as a villain. The gun-crazy 80s turned him into a vigilante "hero" and I bypassed every single comic emblazoned with his SS-wannabe costume. I read the Executioner novels, when I was in high school and a little gun crazy myself. I grew up. the Punisher devolved.

I like Mike Baron, I love Nexus and enjoyed Badger and his time on Wally West. Bill Reinhold is a fine artist. baron is in pure men's adventure pulp mode and he knows how to write this stuff better than anyone this side of Will Murray, with the possible exceptions of Chuck Dixon and Tim Truman. Still, this is like a GI Joe movie, written by John Millius. I kept expecting little Maggie to turn into Natalie Portman and gun people down (this is before Leon, so, thankfully, Baron is above that).

Buried in this mess is a real piece of commentary. The colonel is running drugs to fund his operations. This time period was filled with the revelations of Iran-Contra, where the CIA sold weapons to Iran, for cash used to finance the Contras (the ex-Samosa killers) in Nicaragua, in their civil war that killed more innocents than soldiers. Meanwhile, journalist after journalist was researching stories about drug pipelines into the US, that seemed tooriginate in CIA operations in Central America. It was one of Project Censored's top stories of the year, for one of their 1990s book publications, relating back to investigations by teh Christic Institute, which informed Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz's non-fiction graphic novel, Brought to Light, published by Eclipse Comics. There was strong evidence that the CIA's drug operations to finance covert operations in Central America was responsible for much of the cocaine landing on US shores. Baron has a background in journalism and his stories filter stuff like this. His tone has always shifted a bit in between conservative and liberal POVs, depending on what he is writing. I don't know if that is deliberate or just a reflection that he swings different ways, depending on the topic (as do most people, when you get down to it, beyond the abstracts of Right vs Left).

This is still better than that last Punisher graphic novel, not that that is high praise.

By the way, the school isn't Top Gun or Top Gun School; it's the US Navy Fighter Weapons School and Maverick would have been grounded long before ever being allowed to set foot at NAS Miramar. So, don't look to Tom Cruise movies for accuracy, though it sure suckered a lot of people into enlisting in the Navy, only to find out that only officers get to fly aircraft.

Given the title, I don't know why Castle doesn't fly the A-6 Intruder in the dogfight, except that the A-7 looks more like a fighter (it's an attack plane, and , therefor, designed for close-air support, not dogfighting). I think the F-5 mistake was probably down to a miscommunication between Baron and Reinhold, as the script says Air Force and the plane says Navy, in the artwork. The F5 was used at Fighter Weapon School as an aggressor aircraft and Top Gun had made it quite prominent on the screen, which is probably why it is here. It would have made more sense for Castle to have stolen one of them, to have a chance in a dogfight with an F-14 (and a seasoned pilot). It also makes more sense that some private operation would be more likely to have an F5 (or two) rather than the vastly more expensive F-14. Then again, aircraft carrier mountains in Utah.....

Kirby help me; there are 3 more Punisher GNs to get through, before I reach the end of the Marvel Graphic Novel line (at least, the officially numbered series). meanwhile, up next is an adaptation of William Gibson's Neuromancer, before Keanu made a hash of it. it was only about 5 years old, at this point; before everyone was yacking about cyberpunk this and cyberpunk that (though not too much before, as the Cyberpunk comic, from Innovation, will debut around the same time).

ps Reverend Sun Myung Moon was a real anti-Communist and pretty damn wealthy and shady.  Rev Moon is the photo on the left; the one on the right is Soon-Tek Oh, a Korean actor who appeared in a few episodes of MASH and several other tv shows and movies (including The Final Countdown, as a Japanese pilot).

Not very observant!  I can tell from here.

Marvel Graphic Novel #52, Neuromancer (Vol 1)



Whoaaaaaaaaa!

Creative Team: Tom DeHaven-adaptor.scripter, Bruce Jensen-art, Kurt Hathaway-letters, David Harris-editor

This was packaged by Byron Preiss and published under the Epic imprint.

Of course, this is the seminal Cyberpunk novel from William Gibson, published in 1984, at the height of Big Brother paranoia (it's not paranoia if you turn out to be right! ) and like his previous short stories, is set ion a future noir world, filled with hackers, conglomerates that are laws unto themselves (and their security are private armies), shadowy military and government types, conspiracies, mercenary soldiers and a bunch of other cliches. It owed much to John Carpenter's Escape from New York, the novels of Robert Stone, street slang from late 60s Toronto (drug dealers and bikers, primarily), and punk music. He began writing it when Blade Runner was released to theaters and found that the film's visual style matched the tone of what he had written (which was about a third of the novel) and found himself rewriting things so as not to apepar to be copying from it (though Philip K Dick, in many ways, is one of the godparents of Cyberpunk, much as Michael Moorcock was to Steampunk).

Synopsis: Henry Case walks through Chiba City, in Japan. He stops in his favorite bar, hears a drug dealer and pair of goons are looking for him and meets a girl, who a previous contact thought was his girlfriend. She's a junkie who warns him about the drug dealer. We get Chase's history: a hacker who got caught and crippled with a drug that prevents him from linking, neurally, into cyberspace...



Case is in Japan, hoping that their neuro-surgeries can restore his abilities. They failed and took his last dime. He became mixed in the criminal world, working as a middleman, which put him in contact with Wage, the dealer hunting him. He spots someone tailing, buys a weapon and escapes through luck. He heads back to the Chatsubo bar, where Wage catches up to him, but tells him he hasn't been hunting him and he is being set up. He returns home, expecting to find Linda, the junkie, going through his stash; but, finds the woman he eluded on the streets. She's there to hire him, not kill him. She takes him to meet a man, named Armitage, who speaks of a cyber war spec ops mission...



He offers surgery to repair Case, in exchange for his services. Surgery done, Case goes to a friend to check out Armitage and Screaming Fist, the mission Armitage spoke of. Only one man made it out of Russia, alive. He and the street samurai, Molly Millions, go to see knife fights and run into Linda, who is on the run from a killer. Molly kills him, but not before he got to Linda and just ahead of him using a razor on Case.

Case and Molly travel back to the US, to the Boston-to-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis, aka BAMA, aka The Sprawl.



Armitage tells Case that they fixed it so he can't get high and he has a ticking timebomb of the neurotoxin that took his cyberlinks away, which can be neutralized with an enzyme, if he does his job. He and Moplly go to an old warehouse and he is given his cyberdeck and plugs into the matrix...



Molly goes for some gear, while Armitage briefs Case. he is to go in and free a cyber recording of his mentor from their files; but, to do so, he must hack through their security systems. he conducts cuber recon, while Molly does it in the physical world. They are ready. Molly sets up a diversion, using modern cyber terrorists, while Case breaks in, virtually. Molly then infiltrates physically. case interrupts security systems and locates data that points top where the physical recording of Phelps, Case's mentor, resides. Molly uses a high tech camouflage suit, but still runs into security and gets wounded. Police, tipped off to the terrorist attack, shoot up the place, allowing Molly to move in the chaos. he gets out with the recording and meets back up with Case. Meanwhile, the terrorists feed her intel about who is behind Armitage; something called Wintermute. Case gets a call from them, on a public line, and the story ends...

Thoughts: Bruce Jenson worked primarily as a cover illustrator for science fiction books, including works by Charles Sheffield and cyberpunk author Neal Stephenson. The look of his art is reminiscent of a sketchier Ken Steacy, more due to how he uses color, rather than his line. In fact, the art reminds one of Innovations Cyberpunk comic, from Scott Rockwell and Darryl Banks, with covers by Steacy. That series came out around the same time as this. There is also a strong element of Katsuhiro Otomo's designs for Neo-Tokyo, in Akira, which dovetailed with the cityscapes of Blade Runner.

A lot of the early cyberpunk is a melange of coincidences and direct influence. The visual side owed much to the works of Moebius in Metal Hurlant/Heavy Metal (as well as other MH contributors). Moebius and Dan O'Bannon created The Long Tomorrow, in 1976, with a noirish future detective story, that was written while working on Alejandro Jodorowsky's aborted Dune project. The story shares elements that match up to Philip K Dick's original novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The comic story would be featured in Metal Hurlant, then be translated for Heavy Metal. When the HM movie was being developed, Moebius refused permission to adapt his stories, leading to the creation of two of its most popular segments: Harry Canyon and Tarna (derived from The Long Tomorrow and Arzach, respectively). Like Dick, O'Bannon was influenced by the hard boiled detective stories of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Ridley Scott drew inspiration from the work of Moebius (with whom he worked, on Alien) in creating the future world of Blade Runner (as well as the industrial concept designs of Syd Mead). Around the time the movie was launched, Katsuhiro otomo launched his seminal manga series, Akira, set in the post-nuclear holocaust city of Neo-Tokyo, where the horror that destroyed the city has been reawakened, due to government experiments in psychic abilities. The work is filled with massive high tech skyscrapers, matching Scott's vision, which itself was influenced by the Tokyo Ginza.

All these influences were gelling and, at the movies, the first out of the gate was John Carpenter's Escape From New York. It was set in the future of 1997, where the US and the USSR had fought a conventional war, to a stalemate, while poison gases and bio agents were used, which slowly began driving the citizens of those nations insane, leading to massive rises in crime rates. The US creates a national police force to deal with it and turns Manhattan into a maximum security prison, walling off the island and dumping criminals there for a life sentence. Air Force One is hijacked and the president ejects in an escape pod, landing in the prison, with a cassette tape revealing the technology of a Cobalt dirty bomb that changes the balance of power. Ex-Special Forces operator Snake Plissken, a newly arrived inmate, is offered a pardon in exchange for getting the president and the tape out. The film was a cynical response to Watergate and Vietnam, satirizing the corruption of government, futility of war, and the urban decay of the country, with the world seeming to go mad. The film had a modest budget that earned big box office. William Gibson was influenced by the plot (which factors into background, here, as well as Case's mission and neural timebomb, as Snake has micro-explosives injected into his arteries, which will go off in 22 hours, if not neutralized, if and when he emerges with the president. The rest is a mixture of urban countercultures, especially drug trade and hustlers, with cyberspace being the new virtual crime landscape. The writing, itself, owes much to the crime fiction that influenced it.

DeHaven adapts Gibson's voice well and this was to have a part 2, but it never appeared. Preiss packaged a few books through Epic, including the completed Th Stars My Destination, from Howard Chaykin, adapting the Alfred Bester novel. He would go on to write the excellent It's Superman, with a relatively realistic take on the concept of an alien Superman on Earth, at the time of his conception.

This work kind of fell victim to bad timing. The Cyberpunk explosion was on the cusp, but, it wouldn't really take hold until the 90s, as the internet became more of a concrete thing (it was there in 1989, but still very much an infant) and the works of Gibson and Neal Stephenson and others took hold of the sci-fi world. Generation X was coming into its own, in a cynical world where restraints on conglomerate had been all but erased and their influence, globally, was growing exponentially. We came out of a war to secure oil, a war sold with video game footage and tight controls on the media presentation. Generation X would soon learn that they would be the first modern generation worse off, economically, than their parents. That generation saw the transition from grant and scholarship programs to student loans for college, saddling them with crushing debt and dumping them out on a soft job market, where their expensive degrees often had little use.

In 1993, I went to work for Barnes & Noble, after deciding that I didn't want to sit in any more classrooms to go through the motions of getting teaching certification, to be underpaid and useless in a system designed to teach standardized testing, rather than develop minds to think and deal with the real world. Many of my colleagues were big into cyberpunk writings, as they saw their world reflected in the cynical futurist crime stories. I was still reading adventure comics, though increasingly more from the indie world and reading the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Neil Gaiman (as they emerged). I had left behind X-Men, but had discovered the Wild Cards series of mosaic novels. Still, when a group of people got together to play the cyberpunk Role Playing Game Shadowrun, I accepted an invitation to join them, even though I wasn't into RPGs. We mostly hung out, talked pop culture and played the game like a gonzo episode of the A-Team, with more bloodletting, tech buzzwords, and magic spells (I always hated that element of the game, as science and magic don't mix, in my book) and a soundtrack of Vangellis and Shoji Yamashiro. (the composer and conductor of the soundtrack to Akira). This reminds me of those days. Funny thing is, I never cared for cyberpunk literature. The world was bleak enough without escape into an even bleaker world. I had watched enough Looney Tunes to know that the world was absurd, so you might as well have a laugh or two, while you are fighting the bullies who exploited the situation.

Gibson's writing was very visual, in style and a whole graphic novel series had great potential; but, Byron Preiss was always launching endeavors that fizzled out, Marvel didn't give a crap about Epic, and the audience wouldn't be there for a couple of more years. By that point, Gibson had been burnt by adaptations and was more cautious. Just as well, as no one needs another Johnny Mnemonic, goofy guilty pleasure or not.

The whole idea of movie adaptations to comics has never really attracted me but I'm half-minded to get that Dragonslayer book just for the Marie Severin artwork.