Friday, June 09, 2023

Micronauts #9 and #10

Micronauts #9: Home is Where the Heart Is

Micronauts #10: Defeat

He-Man is always at war with Skeletor. Flash Gordon is always at war with Ming. There is no reason why Arcturus Rann and his plucky band of rebels should not have fought a never-ending battle with Karza: never defeated by him, but never quite overthrowing him, either.

This was before the Empire Strikes Back. We didn't know the Star Wars trilogy was going to have a definite conclusion. We didn't even know that it was a trilogy.

But the Micronauts saga is heading towards a definite finale. Baron Karza may not have been part of Bill Mantlo's original conception: he was part of the second wave of Micronauts toys; and therefore not one of the figurines that Adam Mantlo would have been playing with on Christmas morning. He must have been added to the mythos when Mego sent Marvel a full set of toys as reference material. So maybe Mantlo's original idea had been for a comic in which six plucky heroes go on plucky voyages and have plucky adventures on a month-to-month basis. And maybe he really thought of the Karza saga as an origin story, a prelude to the toy-level Star Trek he had originally envisaged. And perhaps that gave him freedom to work towards an end-point, long before the idea of "graphic novels" and "writing for the trade" had gone mainstream.

Issue #11 will have "saga's end" printed on the cover. The baddies are going to actually, decisively, lose.   


We're back in the Microverse. Everyone is talking about a final battle. The cards are very firmly on the table. We've been told everything we're going to be told about the setting. If we still haven't got it straight in our heads, there's not much hope for us. But Mantlo isn't hurrying to get to his climax. He's going to make us mark time for an episode or two. Build up the suspense. Burn through a couple of sub-plots. 

The Final Resolution is going to come down to a one-to-one face off between the Good Guy and the Bad Guy, so it's a canny move for the Penultimate Act to be a full on star war. Every frame is stuffed with toy spaceships, many more than we can count or process. Nearly every panel is saturated with space-coloured ink and a starry, starry background. And Acroyear's back-story is dialled up to eleven. 

Acroyear is not the main character; but he's the most intriguing one. The one who turns Micronauts from "science fiction" to "science fantasy". The armoured knight who calls himself prince and whose evil turncoat brother is the arch-villain's top henchmen. Showing us the Acroyear home-world could have spoiled him, in the way that the Jedi Knights were (arguably) spoiled once we knew they had a temple and a library and a kindergarten. (Bob Howard had the good sense never to let us see the country Conan came from.) But Mantlo largely pulls it off. 

It's called Spartak. It's an Arthurian, medieval world. It's totally made out of rock. Everyone lives in castles or caves or towers. The castles are miles high and the mountains are hundreds of miles high. There are no artisans or servants. Everyone wears their armour at all times, and they never remove their masks. (This, I imagine, is the way.) You might have expected them to be Klingons, obsessed with personal honour; but they are actually Vulcans: their racial characteristic is that they never show their emotions. Acroyear has a lady love, Cilicia, but they show their love by gently touching their palms together. (This was after Star Trek but before Star Trek: The Next Generation.) Spartak is exactly the world that you would have wanted Acroyear to come from: it's as cool as he is, and it makes him even cooler.

Baron Karza was very, very cross when Shaitan failed to capture Arcturus Rann in issue #4. As a punishment, he removed the Thoughtwash he had placed Spartak under. The noble Acroyears, it seemed, had only sided with Karza because Karza had used Science to make them think that Acroyear, their rightful king, was dead. Once the Thoughtwash was removed, the Acroyears turned against Shaitan; but they also turned against Karza. So the Dark Lord now has to deal with an entire planet of psychotic armoured space-knights rising up against him. 

Lords of Darkness, eh? They just aren't terribly bright.

Karza directs his fleet to Spartak, leaving Homeworld relatively undefended. Argon and Slug start their revolution, although they know it is destined to fail. Argon notices what a great queen Slug would make. Ran and Mari leap into their spaceships and join the Acroyear's defence.


Karza is standing on the hull of one of his starships: so naturally Rann dive-bombs him in a fighter. Karza has a supervillain forcey-field around him, so the attack has no effect, and everyone assumes Rann is dead, It's over and done with in a couple of panels: quite an odd way to handle the first major confrontation between the main hero and the main villain. But I think we can see what is going on: issue #11 will belong to Rann. This one is all about Acroyear. 

He is making his way to something called the Crystal Chamber. Bug wants to go with him, but isn't allowed to. Alone in the Chamber, Acroyear takes his armour off. He seems to be naked underneath it. We see his face: he looks like a dark skinned claymation frog. "The World Mind can only be wielded by a King and through accident of birth, I am a King" he exposits. What in the world is the World Mind? Mantlo is hurling ideas at us again. On one page we are introduced to the ultimate secret weapon which has never before been used; and on the next panel, Acroyear uses it. 

"Can any Acroyear risk less than his life to save his world?" says Acroyear

"Oh my beloved" says Cilicia "Can any Acroyear risk more?"

Fizz! Fizz! Turn up the Wagner. 


Comics are at their best when they are doing the kinds of things which comics are best at doing. (This is also true of interpretative dance routines and limericks.) The final pages of Micronauts #9 may not be displaying the pyrotechnics of a Frank Miller or a Dave Sim, but they are very much in tune with the dynamic of the form. At the bottom of page 16, is a strip of three frames, each showing Acroyear grimacing. His eyes have lost their pupils and turned pure white, a trait he shares with X-Men's Storm. Cilicia seems to be narrating: "We are one with our world...one with our king." Acroyear continues the thought "All...the generations! All the years of our race!"

Boom. Boom. Fizz.  

And then we flip the page. A full page splash. Two pictures of Acroyear, not separated by a frame or a gutter. A long shot of his torso and arms being buried or consumed by crystalline rocks; a close up of his face; eyes closed now; in some kind of pain. Three text boxes, heavily edged in yellow. It might be Cilicia's voice, or Acroyear's or just the narrator. Up to now, Mantlo's world-building has been clumsy and expository. But now, the act of telling seems to be part of the narrative: we're listening to a story within a story.

"The legend of the Acroyears: in the dim past a race was driven from its home. The fugitives wandered for millennia as exiles among the stars. Finally they came upon a harsh, cold, forbidding world of stone. 'World, may we settle here?' they asked."

Last month we had a superhero, with patriotism and cliche oozing out of his spandex. This month we have a sentient planet. And as King of the Acroyears, Acroyear can somehow merge with it; or channel it; or control it. Details are a bit vague. His dialogue is now edged in yellow, as if his voice has merged with the voice of the narrator, or the voice of the story itself. His word balloons are square, and fills the place where we would expect "the next issue" caption to fit. It doesn't particularly point us towards the next issue. 

It just says "I am Worldmind".

Honestly, I don't know if I can convey how weird, how audacious this seemed in 1979; wrapped around advertisements for Technical Lego and scantily clad posters of Cheryl Ladd. An ending of an episode which isn't an ending of an episode; a story which gets louder and louder and changes gear and stops. It's not the same as encountering Galactus or finding out who really killed Luke's dad, but it's certainly a moment. 

Worldmind. It sounds like it should be German; weltgeist or weltenbaum. I don't know if Mantlo knew Wagner but he certainly knew Thor. Spaceships and space-knights and sentient planets all in the space of seventeen pages. 

Thor had met Ego the Living Planet a decade previously: but there was a Kirbyish whackiness to Ego; a planet with a literal human face; a gigantic Man in the Moon with a green beard. Worldmind is more audacious, in a way, and more exciting. Acroyear, a character we have got to know and like, merged with the soul of his planet, is going to physically create earthquakes to swallow the invaders. He is going to literally throw mountains at them. He is going to change the planets density so their spaceships can't take off. Never mind Thor: it's all quite Biblical. 

Oh, sinner-man, where are you going to run to? 

For a series of comics about toys, it's quite violent and even dark. When the Dog Soldiers ask Cilicia for mercy, she beheads them with her lightsaber energy sword. On Homeworld, Slug summarily executes the rich humans who supported Karza. One of the Dog Soldiers points his gun at the head of an Acroyear infant. Alec Guiness rightly said that the violence of Star Wars is play violence: goodies say bang-bang and baddies fall over, but there is no sense of anyone being harmed. Mantlo is happy to show that people, actual people, are killed in wars. (He was born in the 50s; he didn't serve, but contemporaries must have been drafted to Vietnam.) 

The art feels different. Big panels and full page spreads: the characters are larger and solider than they were before. If we are right that the first six issues were the product of a paste up job, perhaps that put limits on what Michael Golden thought he could achieve. Perhaps incoming inker Al Milgrom is doing a better job at accentuating Golden's line-work than Jeff Rubinstien had been able to. Or perhaps, now the back story is established, Mantlo is presenting the artists with less exacting briefs. You don't need to cram a dozen characters into a panel. Just relax and tell the story. 

Page 15 of issue #10 ends with a row of four square panels, alternating between Cilicia's face and the face of the terrified Dog Soldier; followed by one long panel of Cilicia swinging her sword. His plea for mercy is detached from the frame, hanging in slither of blank space. (Dave Sim or Frank Miller would not have bothered with the sword; there would have just bee a sound effect saying SLASH!) The actual violence is not shown, but one still wonders what the comics code thought it was doing. 

Page 10 is a grid of six frames, two rows of three: two pictures of Karza's ships being attacked by the planet, and a third of Acroyear's face against a star-scape, chanting curses or spells against his enemies. 

Page 12 is a three by two grid, each pictures an unrelated battlefield vignette: an Acroyear throwing a sword, Dog Soldiers menacing civilians and charging into battle, and, finally, a close up of Acroyear's face. Each frame contains only the single word of dialogue. Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! This is a writer paying attention to the architecture of a comic book page.

While the planet burns around them, Shaitan taunts Cilicia and Cilicia knocks him across the hall: his mask falls off, and he is revealed to be an albino. This kind of thing happens a lot in science fiction and fantasy: a very intense, personal moment happens while a huge far reaching event is going on in the background. One thinks of Eowyn reconciling herself with Theoden while the last great battle of our time rage around them; or Orion revealing his identity to Bekka a few moments before New Genesis explodes. It's a narrative version of the Pathetic Fallacy: the turbulence in the hero's souls reflected in the world around them.

I think it was Alan Moore who said that Daredevil's personality is that he is blind and Professor X's personality is that he is bald. Revealing Shaitan's skin colour gives him one more character trait in addition to "he's a traitor". He think everyone hates him because of his white skin: but of course this has never been true. It might have been a better plot development if Acroyear's people really did hate and disinherit white people; giving Shaitan a genuine, rather than an imagined, grievance.

"I know, little one" says Biotron "We have only each other now." Mari has gone off to repeat Rann's stunt, crashing her spaceship into Karza and getting captured for her trouble. Mari swears vengeance, carries out the exact same stunt, and is also captured. Bug throws himself into the fray, and is unceremoniously killed off. He'll only stay dead for only three issues, but it's a sensible bit of plotting. The comic relief would be otiose during the heroic resolution. Shakespeare killed off Falstaff in Act 1 of Henry V for the exact same reason. Microtron is often said to be the Artoo Deetoo analogue; the feisty little robot in contrast to the pompous Biotron. And last issue he was part of the comic relief, alongside Bug, tossed on his head and unable to right himself. But he's the one who rounds out issue 10, announcing that he is going "To battle to avenge the Micronauts", to which Biotron replies, simply "Oh". It's as if the little droid has taken on Acroyear's personality, and the big one (separated from commander Rann) has become the coward.

Or perhaps Mantlo can't always remember which is which.

Issue 9 ended with an anonymous voice telling the story of the Acroyears. Issue 10 ends with the story teller unmasking. The Time Travellers break the fourth wall and talk to the reader:

Thus the players play their parts
Thus the drama runs its course
Carrying all and sundry to their end
Final meeting with Enigma Force.

Mantlo is no longer bothering to conceal the fact that this issue -- and arguably the last ten issues -- have been an exercise in pushing the characters into the correct position for the denouement. But that is probably all story telling ever is.



Hi,

I'm Andrew.

I am trying very hard to be a semi-professional writer and have taken the leap of faith of down-sizing my day job.


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