Micronauts #7 (the back-story)

Micronauts #2 and #3 included full page "pin ups" of Time Traveller and Karza respectively. This was relatively common in the olden days. No-one actually cut their comics up and pinned pages to walls. But artists drew "studies" and "reference images" of the main characters during the pre-production phase, and editors used the art when issues needed to be padded out. There were often spare pages in the first few issues of a title because there was nothing to print in the letter-column. 

Issue #4 included a diagrammatic schematic of the Endeavour. I assume this was also repurposed reference material. But I am a sucker for this kind of thing. The Fantastic Four sometimes showed a diagram of the Baxter Building and the Teen Titans included layouts of the Titans Tower. I think Stan Lee even offered us a map of Peter Parker's apartment. No-one expected the writers to actually refer to these layouts: but they established that the Avengers mansion was the sort of place of which a map could conceivably exist. It was a signal of how we were supposed to approach these stories. The main reason to put a map at the front of a fantasy novel is to tell the reader that this is the sort of fantasy novel that has a map at the front of it.

It's a cool diagram. The Endeavour seems a lot bigger than it is generally drawn in the comic -- maybe 60 feet tall relative to Rann, or about 30 inches when it is toy-sized. We can see that the ship's bridge detaches to become the Astrostation; which is fun; and there is a hanger containing something called a Hydrocopter which we will catch a glimpse of in a few issues time. Rann's suspended animation chamber is "now" converted into a rec room and library, although it is hard to see how anyone has found the time to reconfigure the ship in the last few issues.

You might expect the small print (in typescript rather than comic book lettering) to be a technical description of the ship's capabilities. But it's actually a description of its mission; which amounts to a fresh re-telling of the History Of The Microverse. One wonders whether it comes from Mantlo's private notes: it could even be his original pitch document. It's an odd thing to do: the fullest explanation of what is going on in the comic, buried in very small print under a diagram of a toy spaceship. A lot of readers probably skipped it.

Alan Moore would do a similar thing in Watchmen, years later: hiding part of his world-building in story-internal newspaper clippings at the end of each issue. Some readers found them too boring to even contemplate reading. When Dave Sim started to incorporate prose passages into Cerebus some readers took it as evidence that he hated his readers.

We don't feel, reading this text, that much new data is being revealed. We have known from the beginning that Rann has been away from Homeworld for a millennium. It's written on his character sheet, the thing which makes him more than a generic action figure, and it's restated every issue. "I've only been in suspended animation for the last 1,000 years." "You're at least 1,000 years older than the princess." "1,000 years in suspended animation doesn't dull the hurt." 

We are also told from the beginning that he is "hooked into the telepathy channels of his ship, that he "explored space telepathically"; that he is telepathically linked to Biotron and that on his voyage he encountered a mysterious Something which Karza is afraid of. The cheat sheet in issue #1 talks about "the X-factor that Karza fears"; and Karza says Rann represents "the unknown that must be made to reveal itself". In issue #2, Rann repeats that Karza "wants the telepathic data locked in my brain".

The text piece attached to the spaceship plans ties all this together:

"His body slept while his mind explored the universe via a telepathic linkage with his Roboid companion. As the long centuries passed, the combined consciousness of man and roboid melded, became inseparable."

The language drifts into the religious:

"They had become two coequal, co-existent entities."

One could very easily imagine a comic book about a human who shares his consciousness with a machine; but Micronauts is not that comic: Biotron never presents as anything other than Rann's friend and co-pilot. They banter on the flight deck like mates, but not, in any sense, like the first two person's of the Trinity.

We suspect that the Time Travellers are related to the X-Factor in in Rann's head -- we know that they first popped up during his long voyage -- but his relationship to them is now made more explicit: 

"Baron Karza knew that Rann had encountered mysteries on the fringes of the Microverse that might shake (his) rule."

"Time Travellers manifested, strange beings who seemed to belong to no reality save their own..."

"Baron Karza knew that Commander Rann was somehow linked to the Time Travellers and the elusive Enigma Force they represented..."

So: Rann's background has been alluded to in dialogue; and then described again in text. In issue #7, while Steve is fishing, and before Man Thing attacks, we hear the story again; narrated by Biotron while Rann is asleep. But this time, Mantlo shows us what he has previously told us about. We get a three page flash-back. We see the Endeavour being launched; we see a not yet deified Dallan and Sepsis saying farewell to their son, and a not-yet-evil Karza in the background. There are flags and horses and doves and some very silly costumes: if contemporary Homeworld looks like Star Wars, it is fair enough that Olden Days Homeworld looked like Flash Gordon. Dallan is described as the regent of Homeworld, although his relationship to Argon and Mari's royal family is unexplained. Chief Scientist Karza was described in issue #1 and on the schematic as one of Rann's tutors at the Science Academy but here he is described as "the man who has tutored the commander from birth". We see Rann and Biotron making first contact with some very silly aliens with very silly names. We see them travelling to the Space Wall and we see them encountering the Time Travellers. 

Up to this point, Time Traveller has been presented as a deus ex machina; a familiar spirit that haunts the ship and gives advice and aid to Rann and Mari. But he is now part of an angelic choir, singing "Welcome to the Enigma Force."  Up to now it has been implied that Biotron and Rann merged because they spent so long in telepathic contact; but now we are told that it is a mystical event which occurred as a result of their contact with the Time Travellers. They are coequal and coeternal because of the Enigma Force.

Allude, imply; then tell directly; finally, show. Mantlo does a similar thing with Karza's back story. That Karza is a conquerer, and that he controls his people by offering them infinitely extended life is taken for granted from the very first issue. "Karza gave the people a more concrete offer -- the assurance of immortality"; "he offered them immortality...for a price"; "those who defied him served as organ donors to extend the lives of those who submitted." The whole Slug/Belladona sub-plot through issues #2-#7 shows us the process happening: Belladonna reserving Mari's body; naked captives being deloused and prepared for ghoulish experiments. But a full page montage in issue #5 gives us a good look at how Homeworld functions. The rich can buy immortality; the middle class earn credits to extend their lives; the workers gamble for life points and the rebels are recycled in the Body Banks or recruited as Dog Soldiers. This never really becomes relevant to this story: sometimes we feel as if we are reading the campaign notes for a Science Fiction Role-playing Game that no-one has quite got around to running.

What is happening? Are we watching ideas coalesce in Mantlo's own head, as he himself gradually figures out what he means by the Enigma Force and the Time Travellers? Or is he responding to editorial pressure to damn well give the readers some clue as to what is going on? Or did the writer intend from the beginning for the Microverse to have this fractal quality; so that the closer you look, the more you see. 

We rarely feel that we are learning a new fact. No-one says "Good heavens the butler" or "No, I am your father". But things become clearer and clearer on each repetition. Our reaction is not "Wow! A new twist!". It's more like "Ah, Time Travellers. Did we know that already?"

Intentionally or not, Mantlo has again put his finger on one of the things that made Star Wars so genre-defining. George Lucas has a scatter-gun approach to backstory: Jedi Knights, Dark Side of the Force, the Clone Wars, the Spice Mines of Kessel, Kessel run, Jundland Wastes, Imperial Senate, Jawas, Sand People, moisture evaporators... Some of the material is decoded in the actual movie. We hear about the Rebel Alliance in the opening crawl and see their hidden fortress in the final act; we are introduced to Darth Vader in the opening scene and gradually learn that he is a former Jedi, Ben's apprentice and the murderer of Luke's father. But most of the details are under-defined. Fans wanted very badly to know how the back story worked. Lucas made them wait twenty six years, and his answers met with near-universal disappointment. But by alluding to mysterious events and explicating them almost immediately, Mantlo is giving Star Wars fans the exact experience that they wanted. 

Or thought they did.

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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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Micronauts #6 and #7

Micronauts 6: The Great Escapes

Micronauts 7: Adventure into Fear

Prof Prometheus and Ray Coffin have fallen into the Prometheus pit. Rann and his friends are engaged in a super-heroic romp in Marvel Florida. And Argon is still unrelatedly imprisoned in Karza's body banks. It's going to take a little bit of effort for Bill Mantlo to get his plot threads back in sync.

You could sum up Micronauts #6 by saying "There is a confused whirlwind of action and everyone escapes". And that is hardly the worst thing you could say about a superhero comic. For eleven out of the seventeen pages, Steve Coffin and the Micronauts effect their escape from Prometheus's lair. As usual, the artwork and the speed of exposition make it a little hard to keep track of what is going on; but that feeling of information-overload is rather exhilarating. Rann and Acroyear make their escape by flying the Astrostation along the obligatory ventilation shaft. Steve and Muffin (being too large to take that route) bluff their way out of the front door. Everyone is threatened by Prometheus's humanoids (for one panel) but they manage to regroup and return to Steve's house, where they find Biotron being menaced, rather ineffectually, by a cat. They power up the Endeavour and fly away, pursued by the police, who still think that they are a UFO. There is an overwhelming sense that the purpose of the HELL sub-plot has been to get Phillip and Ray into the Microverse, and with that accomplished, Mantlo wants to whisk our heroes to the next plot beat with all possible haste.

Very conveniently, Steve's Dad owns a cabin in the Everglades (a mere four hundred miles away) so that's where our heroes head, to rest and take stock. Issue #7 opens with the team fishing, watching TV, narrating new bits of the back-story to each other and grabbing a few hours sleep. It's quite a canny move on Mantlo's part. Rann has been engaged in a non-stop chase scene for the past six issues, and a bit of down-time cements our sense that the Micronauts are a team -- even a family -- and not merely a collection of playing pieces. It's a bit like that transitional scene in the Millennium Falcon where everyone plays chess and practices fencing for three minutes. Readers are much less inclined to say "Hey! But you guys have only known each other since this morning."

But the Gods of Marvel say that you can't have a whole issue without a fight scene; and even if we hadn't seen the cover, we would know that the Everglade Swamps are where the Man Thing hangs out. And also the Lizard, but he's contractually obliged to only fight Spider-Man. 

Fans like cross-overs; at any rate, editors believe they do. And everything Marvel publishes has to intersect with the wider Marvel continuity. The big question fans asked about any new comic was not "Is it good?" but "Where does it fit into the Marvel Universe?" The expected answer was "Right in the middle!" Some fans had thought that the existence of a Star Wars comic book logically implied a Spider-Man & Chewbacca issue of Marvel Team Up, and were most put out when it failed to materialise. Bill Mantlo had, of course, started his career as the Cross-Over King, and Man Thing was between comics. His own title had come to a post-modernist conclusion in October 1975, and he wouldn't get another one until November 1979. (His first regular title had been an anthology comic called Adventure into Fear which is also the title of Micronauts #7.)

Man Thing is not, truly, a particularly interesting character. He's a scientist who, as a result of an experiment gone wrong, has been turned into a swamp-dwelling monster. Unlike DC's Swamp Thing he doesn't even get any dialogue. But he had a distinct fan-following due to the the surreal and politically switched-on writing of Steve Gerber, who had parted company with Marvel in 1979 due to a well-documented duck-related dispute. Fans tend to follow characters rather than authors and a big picture of Man Thing on a cover very probably shifted titles. In our content flooded streaming era, it is hard to believe that back then a character could be popular but underexposed. As iconic a hero as the Silver Surfer was not allowed his own comic between 1970 and 1987, making his rare cameos seem like Very Important Events. 

It may be that Mantlo intends the encounter with the Man Thing to develop Steve Coffin's character. The monster (who has empathic powers instead of a personality) homes in on Steve because he is Sad. He nearly destroys him because he is Scared, and whatever knows fear burns at the Man Things touch. But he goes away because Steve is Brave. Apparently, he has never come across anyone brave before and impales himself on a rotary fan. The heroes think he is dead, but we know that Man Things can re-form after they get squished. I don't know if this new-found courage would have been part of a character-arc, because Steve will be pretty much written out at the end of next issue. The overall sense is of a nice, change of pace character-based interlude being hijacked by a rather silly fight scene.

Meanwhile back in the Microverse...the other two storylines carry on failing to intersect with each other. The same "logic" which says that our heroes are three inches tall on our side of the Space Wall means that Prometheus and Steve's Dad manifest in the Microverse as Celestial-sized giants. They naturally come to the attention of Baron Karza, who "senses in Prometheus an evil not very different from his own".

Stan Lee used to be very proud of the fact that Doctor Doom was not evil in his own eyes -- he honestly believed that he could rule the universe better than anyone else. The best supervillains, like Thanos and Galactus, have a genuine nobility to them. Granted, Darth Vader consciously follows the Dark Side of the Force, but extended continuity is inclined to say that the Sith are heretical Jedi with their own outlook, not pure Manichean evil. (It's even been said that the Dark Side is "Dark" in the sense of being secret.) But Karza, like David Mitchel's iconic Nazi soldier has evidently considered his place in the narrative structure of the war and realised that he is one of the baddies.

At any rate, Karza hatches a brilliant scheme: he will use Prometheus's gigantic form to conquer the earth. "Prepared the subject for mind-merge!" he announces. The final frame of issue #7 shows a fully armoured and human-sized Karza climbing out of the Prometheus Pit. But while Karza is being Evil, Ray Coffin is drawn towards the Light which turns out to be (of course) a group of Time Travellers. It should not be too difficult for readers to work out where all this is going.

In issue #5, Karza identified Slug (the rebel leader) as a possible body donor for Belladonna (the old lady). In issue #6, Slug blasts through the wall of Argon's cell. Mantlo's habit of skipping transitions adds to the breathlessness of the narrative but frequently makes readers say "Did I miss something?" even on the eighth or ninth reading. Last issue we were pointedly told that all the captives were nude (and the Dog Soldiers were unashamedly leching after Slug) so Argon is puzzled about how she smuggled a gun into the prison. "There are places even Karza's dog soldiers sometimes forget to search, my prince" she explains. It's only a mildly indecent joke, but it does make you wonder whether the comics code was still paying attention. Bionic fascists are evidently more respectful of boundaries than the average airport drug-squad and haven't come up with X-Rays or metal detectors yet.

The two pages of issue #6 (9 and 17) in which the Shadow Priest tells Karza that Prometheus has materialised near the space wall and the two pages (10 and 11) in which Slug rescues Argon don't cross over or reference each other in any way, which tends to confirm that all the Argon material in the last five issues were originally intended for a stand-alone comic. The thread is wound up in a couple of panels in issue #7: Argon and Slug leave the pits and are greeted by one of the Mysterious Shadow Priests who tells mysteriously to prepare for the Final Battle.

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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Micronauts #4 and #5

Micronauts # 4: Death Duel at Daytona Beach Part 2 /  A Hunting We Will Go

Micronauts # 5:  The Prometheus Pit

OK, so that means that our whole solar system could be like one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being. This is nuts! That means that one tiny atom in my fingernail could be one tiny little universe!.... Can I buy some pot from you?

National Lampoon's Animal House

"Sheesh! This Prometheus character is like a bargain basement version of Baron Karza" observes Bug in issue #5 of Micronauts.

Well, quite.

The Marvel Canon Keepers seem to take the view that the Microverse is not literally an itsy bitsy teeny weeny universe; but simply an alien dimension that humans access by shrinking. If you mutter "quantum realm" authoritatively, makes more sense.

Bill Mantlo equivocates on the point. The Microverse is another cosmos, separated from us by something called a Space Wall. Prof. Prometheus speculates that it may be one of many "microscopic universes". But the writer is clearly thinking in terms of sub-atomic particles which have been blown up to planetary size.  Homeworld is depicted as a collection of spheres joined together with little sticks, very much as chemistry teachers illustrate chemical compounds. It's described as "the molecular planet of Homeworld" (issue #4) and "the spiralling molecular chain which is the planet Homeworld" (issue #6). Prior to the 1920s, this would have been tolerably good science fiction. Back then, atoms really were tiny little spheres zooming around according to more or less Newtonian principles, so there's no reason they might not look like planets, from a certain point of view. But it's now 1979 and news of quantum theory really ought to have reached the Marvel Universe. 

Once you have invoked the idea of a Microverse and a Macroverse, it is hard to avoid thinking in terms of  microcosm and macrocosm in the Platonic sense: "as above, so below". Whether this would have occurred to Bill Mantlo I couldn't say. Unlike Jim Starlin or Steve Engelhart, he doesn't strike me as the kind of guy who would have been into mysticism, although the aforementioned Sword in the Star has a distinct hippy vibe. But when he needs to bring his earthbound and microcosmic storylines together, what he comes up with is an earthly conspiracy that mirrors and foreshadows the politics of the Microverse.

Professor Phillip Prometheus is a scientist, and therefore, it almost goes without saying, mad. He was injured during a space mission, and his spaceship's automated repair systems rebuilt him. Better than he was before: stronger, faster, better. He's a cyborg, which given the action-figure genealogy of the Micronauts is quite ironic in itself. 

Cyborg was also the title of the 1972 novel which introduced a very expensive multiple amputee named Steve Austin. The TV show based on the book ended in 1978, but Mantlo uses the term "bionic" to refer to augmented humans without explanation. One side of Prometheus's face is human, but the other side is robotic. A 1973 proto-cyberpunk superhero, Deathlok ("the demolisher"), had the same disfigurement, as did a made-up bounty hunter named Vallance in a 1978 issue of the Marvel Star Wars spin-offs. Deathlok and Valance seem to have had half their faces replaced by machinery: Prometheus is robots all the way down. But he tears off half his face so we can see the robot beneath the skin. He is, incidentally, a black man: but this is not relevant to the story and is never mentioned by any other character: a minor but significant victory for 1979 comic book diversity. Interestingly, DC would introduce a black cyborg called Cyborg the following year.

Prof Prometheus is obsessed with prolonging human life. He has robot minions ("humanoids") who call him The Master and obey his every whim. And he has created a kind of boom-tube or star-gate which connects his laboratory to the Microverse. He calls it, portentously, the Prometheus Pit. When we first meet him in issue #4, he talks like a perfectly sensible scientist ("Welcome, old friend") but when his back story is revealed in issue #5, he shifts to Villain Voice: "I can transcend the small portion of humanity left in me! I can become like unto a god!" 

Prometheus is a former colleague of Ray Coffin, Steve's Dad. Ray Coffin was an astronaut; he and Prometheus served together. Before long, Ray will be having an extremely close encounter with the Enigma Force, just like Rann did on the edge of the Microverse. It's not a terribly subtle analogy: Prof Prometheus is the human equivalent of Karza and Ray Coffin is a lot like Arcturus Rann. As the storyline plays out, the two humans will become explicit avatars for their Microversal equivalents. 

Oh. And while he is on the Endeavour, Rann still likes to sleep in the cryogenic pod he used while he was exploring the Microverse. It is shaped, quite distinctly and explicitly, like a coffin. 

In one way, it all hangs together. Prometheus has become obsessed with the Microverse because he has discovered the remains of Karza's Dog Soldiers who (it appears) keep getting killed while trying to get through the Space Wall. The Dog Soldiers have been said from the beginning to be half-human and half-machine, so it makes sense that a a person with an interest in bionics would want to know more about them. We were told that the roboids of the Microverse were a synthesis of man and machine in the very first issue. This might be dense foreshadowing -- Mantlo might have put a lot of cybertech into Homeworld because he had foreseen the character of Prometheus from the beginning. But it might equally be a sort of retrospective mining of his own material: when he needed an earthly villain, what he had already established about the Microverse suggested an evil bionic man. Prometheus's transformation from skeptical scientist to full on ranting super-baddie in issue #5 is rather sudden: if you told me it was the result of an authorial rethink between issues I would not be entirely surprised. 

DIGRESSION: When our heroes first encountered Muffin in issue #2, they didn't know what sort of a creature he was. Later, Mari explains to Rann that he is a "dog" and that "dogs" are extinct on Homeworld. Even allowing for translation, why would Karza name his stormtroopers after an obscure extinct animal? ("Because it's cool, that's why.")

But even by Marvel Comics standards, quite a lot of belief has to be suspended. When he's first mentioned, Steve's Dad is merely a NASA astronaut who served on Starlab. Starlab is obviously meant to make us think of Skylab which was real and in the news. It crashed out of orbit and into the sea in 1979. It's quite a big jump from the 1970s space programme to super intelligent computers that can rebuild human beings; and quite a big jump from being a US astronaut to creating intra-dimensional portals and secret robot armies. Marvel generally keeps the "real world" and "super science" in separate boxes: we are allowed to believe in the Fantastic Four and the Avengers, but New York Police generally don't have ray guns. But even if we can accept that Steve's Dad's friend is a Reed Richards level genius, it requires a huge leap of faith to accept that Rann just happened to crash his ship in the garden of the human being who is his exact analogy on earth. 

Unless Time Traveller planned it that way. 

The Enigma Force is the manifestation of our old friend, The Plot. When Arcturus Rann was at the very edge of the Microverse, he encountered The Plot. Karza is scared of Rann because Rann seems to have inside knowledge of The Plot. When Mari was imprisoned she was able to summons The Plot to get her out. And in issue #7, one of the mysterious Shadow Priest will quite literally tell Argon that they know the ending of the story but that he won't be needed until the final chapter.

Issue #4 is, truthfully, a bit of a muddle. It tends to confirm the theory that the first issues of Micronauts are the result of a hastily executed cut and paste job, a superhero comic and a Star Wars comic glued together at short notice. For one thing, it has two different titles. The main splash page takes us back to the Microverse, showing us Karza's dog-soldiers raiding "the underground" on Homeworld. (This seems to represent a shift from the opening issue, where "the rebels" were specifically insurgents against the Royal Family.) This is entitled A Hunting We Will Go. The first two issues went with science-fiction lettering and single-word titles  (Homeworld, Escape, Earth) but from #3 onwards we've reverted to standard Marvel bombast. Strangely, the splash-page is enclosed in a larger frame, with head-shots of the main characters in the margin, and a second title at the top: Death-Duel at Daytona Beach Part Two. It's very unusual for a Marvel comic of the era to call a story "part two". Although the story follows on directly from the last episode, it isn't really a duel, and it doesn't take place anywhere near the beach. It seems pretty clear that one comic (Rann and his friends lost on earth) and an entirely separate comic (Karza, Belladona and Argon) have been fairly clumsily edited together. 

Baron Karza himself appears on the cover, for the first time since issue #1. Had Jim Shooter come around to the idea that space opera and Darth Vader lookalikes sell even better than lawnmowers? But in fact, we only get five pages in the Microverse before cutting back to Steve Coffin's yard. Anyone who judged the comic by the cover would have been sorely disappointed. 

The Dog Soldiers arrest the rebels: Karza is primarily interested in a rebel leader called Slug. One of the other rebels does the noble "I'm Spartacus" routine, laying down his life so that Slug has a chance to contact Argon in Karza's cells. The astonishing twist is that Slug is, like, not a boy. In issue #5, the captives are taken to the slave pits. (The captions draw attention to their nudity, but the art coyly contrives that limbs are positioned over private parts.) Duchess Belladonna identifies Slug as the captive whose body she would like her mind transplanted into; and we discover that Karza has turned Argon, for no particularly good reason, into a centaur. I think we are supposed to think he has been amalgamated with Oberon, his telepathic horse from issue #1, but this is not stated directly. 

Meanwhile, Ray takes Steve (who has put some clothes on) to his place of work, to show his old friend Prof Prometheus the wrecked space-craft which proves that they have encountered extraterrestrials. (Just to remind us that we're in the 1970s, Prometheus initially thinks that Steve's imagination has been fired up by Close Encounters of the Third Kind.) Prometheus's institution is called the Human Engineering Life Laboratories, but otherwise there is absolutely nothing sinister about it. Rann, Acroyear and Marie limp back to Steve's house to pick up Bug, but Bug has followed the Coffins to HELL, so they fly off after him in the Astrostation (another detachable section of the Endeavour) leaving Biotron to fix the main ship in Steve's kitchen. 

Left by himself, Biotron wonders out loud if Rann and Mari are in love, and the comic just kind of stops: you could hardly describe it as a cliffhanger. The American reworking of Battle of the Planets introduced a comedic robot called 7-Z-7 who narrated the action for the benefit of the viewer; and Biotron's habit of talking to himself feels like a similar breach of the "fourth wall".

But issue #5 distinctly gets its mojo back. (I am not quite sure what mojo is, but issue #5 definitely has some.) It has some of the qualities of the first issue: an awful lot is going on, and we have to keep our wits about us to avoid getting lost. (For example, the fact that Prometheus's orderlies are robots, referred to as Humanoids, is tossed out in a single speech bubble on page 10.) Mari befriends Muffin (the dog) and gets into Prometheus's lair riding the furry pup like a very big horse; while Acroyear cuts through the electric fence with his light sabre energy sword. He says that he using the ship's blasters would be a waste of energy, but we know perfectly well that it's just cooler that way.  Prometheus rips off his own face, reveals his back story, and drags Ray Coffin into the Pit. One thinks of Holmes and Moriarty.

It is often said that Microtron, the short "fiesty" robot is a stand-in for Artoo Deetoo, while Biotron, the tall, pompous one is a cover version of See Threepio. And this may be true up to a point: although we are repeatedly told that Biotron has a kind of mystical union with Arcturus Rann, we never feel he's much more than a robot butler and side kick. A lot of the time, it is Microtron who gets Threepio's lines: this exchange, just before the big battle is pure Anthony Daniels.

-- What do you think we'll find here, Mr Acroyear?

-- Battle! Glory!

-- Oh dear.

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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Micronauts #2 and #3

Micronauts #2: Earth

Micronauts #3 Death Duel at Daytona Beach

"Tell me why are smurfs so small?"

"We're not small but you are tall."

           The Smurfing Song

Micronauts 3 contains a small mis-print.

Or perhaps it isn't a misprint. Perhaps it is like the barefoot Paul McCartney on the Abbey Road cover, desperately trying to warn his fans that he is no longer alive. Or like that tiny piece of paper that says "Help, I'm being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory."

*

Shaitan (the Dark Lord's lieutenant) is chasing Arcturus Rann (the thousand year old Buzz Lightyear Action figure) across a Florida skate-park. Because of course he is. It's 1978; everything which isn't Star Wars is skate-boarding. 

Not that the location is particularly important. There is a tracking beacon on Rann's ship. Because of course there is. It's the only explanation for the ease of their escape. Shaitan's Battle Cruiser could perfectly will  have been chasing Rann's Endeavour through an asteroid field or across a forest moon. It happens to be chasing it through Florida -- along a freeway and in a skate park and into young Steve Coffin's back garden. It's clearly a Star Wars scene: people keep saying things like "Rear deflector breached" and "Man the thorium guns".

Shaitan's Battle Cruiser splits into six smaller modules. Because of course it does. Modular vehicles were all the rage that season. Judge Dredd had crossed the Cursed Earth in a big land rover that split into two small land rovers. It was called a Killdozer and it was based on a line of Dinky toys, for reasons which have never become entirely clear. Cyborg (Time Traveller's forbear) had a big spaceship, the Invader with a little spaceship, the Interceptor, inside it. Even Gerry Anderson was in on the act, selling his Star Cruiser model kits. It had a detachable cockpit at the front and a piggyback star-fighter on top and a Thunderbird 2 type landing pod on the undercarriage. He never made a TV show to go with it, but there was a cartoon strip in Look-In and the Airfix kit was cool. It was snap-together and came with stickers so it could be assembled by relative klutzes. 

There is probably some deep seated reason why little boys think that big machines which divide into smaller machines are cool. But Shaitan's Battle Cruiser just isn't cool enough. Michael Golden's art is still too sketchy, too small, too distanced; and it's all over and done with in a panel. A big triangular spaceship splits into six tiny small doodles. We needed a double-page schematic at the very least. That's Micronauts all over for you. Cool ideas that don't stay long enough for you to get a decent purchase on them. Perhaps Mantlo just assumed we all had a Battle Cruiser on the bedroom floor and knew what it was meant to look like.

Acroyear (the good guy, the one who looks like a knight in armour) proposes jumping out of the Endeavour (the spaceship) and taking on Shaitan (the bad guy) hand to hand. Biotron (the robot) is left in the pilot's seat and Marie (the princess) is left manning the guns. Acroyear leaps onto one section of the Battle Crusier with a lightsaber energy sword, yelling "Tell your traitor prince that his brother has come for him!" Acroyear gets all the best lines. Until Time Traveller moves to the centre stage, he will provide most of the Fizz in the comic.

And then. We cut back to the Microverse. For just one page.

We are in Baron Karza's body banks. He is standing on a yellow glowing square, surrounded by short green monks who on a bad day could be mistaken for Jawas. They are the mysterious Shadow Priests. Their job is to be mysterious. They don't do anything apart from be mysterious until the big reveal in issue # 11. (It will, in fairness, be a very big big reveal.) He, Karza, is talking to a little old lady, Duchess Belladona. One of the perils of living on the intersection between Mego Action Figures and Kirby's Fourth World is that everyone has very silly names. One of the Baron's underlings is called Major D'Ark. Belladonna wants to buy a new body from Karza. Ideally, she wants Princess Marie's body; but Karza has to admit that she has escaped. Alternatively, the duchess would like Prince Argon, which suggests an admirably enlightened attitude to gender. Karza hisses that he, Argon, is slated for a "rather special experiment ".

And in neat lettering, just under the final panel are the words "To be continued".

And then we cut back to Earth. The US airforce is being scrambled, skateboarders are being tripped up by toy spaceships and Acroyear is yelling "Traitorous Dog!"

"To be continued." At the bottom of the page. Half way through the issue. I can imagine Stan Lee cutting away from a subplot with a wink to the reader "We'll learn more about the mysterious Mr Osborn next issue, but for now..." But To Be Continued comes at the end of an issue. And there are still ten pages to go.

*

The second and third issues of Micronauts entirely fail to pay-off on the promise of the first. Issue # 1 felt more like Star Wars than Star Wars: issues #2 and #3 feel a lot like any other late 70s Marvel Comic. Everyone banters and wise-cracks in the face of certain death. Rann and Marie fall in love at first sight. ("She's one helluva of a girl"; "I like that in a man".) The adjective "feisty" is applied to Microtron. The first cover was a pastiche or half memory of the Star Wars poster: a hero; a princess; a knight; a dark lord. The cover of #2 shows us the same group of characters...threatened by a suburban lawn mower. The tone is comedic; even parodic. Our heroes are running away. Marie has her arms around Rann a little too exaggeratedly, a little too much like a silent movie heroine. There is something of the Warner Brothers cartoon about Bug's demeanour. Only Acroyear seems to rise above it all, literally and metaphorically.

It's perfectly good fun. "Star Wars but Marvel Superheroes" is by no means a terrible selling point. But the consciousness expanding first issue has been relegated to a prologue. Marie and Rann helpfully tell each other things they already know for the benefit of the reader. "The Homeworld you left died ages ago, commander, enslaved by Karza's science; the royal family fought back, but..." "He slew my parents, but that's the least of his evil. He wants every living thing subservient to him..." Characters in 1970s comics did have a bad habit of stating and restating the premise ("Eternals can't die..."). But this feels like a rear-guard action to make sure we're au fait with the salient points after the information-dense first issue. If you started reading with issue #2, you wouldn't feel you'd missed very much. 

I've sometimes called it conceptual story-telling. You can read, say, a late John Carter story, or one of the Conan adventures when Howard wasn't really trying, or anything at all by David Eddings -- and find that you are enjoying the idea of swords and dragons and martians even though the story is doing nothing to make the swords and the dragons and the martians particularly interesting. Kids in particular fill in details for themselves -- you only need a cursory sketch of a pirate ship or the barest hint of a haunted house and they are off on a day dream of their own. (For grown ups, this really only works with soft pornography.) Conceptually, Micronauts #2 and #3 are an absolute blast: tiny epic spaceships zooming through suburbia, tripping up skaters and stunning puppies. But the execution feels perfunctory.

Issue #1 ended with our heroes reaching "the fringe". Issue #2 begins with them crashing through something called The Space Wall. This seems to be a physical barrier which encloses their universe and separates it from ours. Karza's dog soldiers periodically hurl themselves at the barrier and get killed; but Time Traveller, in his primary role as mysterious deus ex machina, has helpfully blasted a hole through it. Rann's thousand year voyage took him literally to the edge of the universe: he is now going to infinity and beyond. 

The hole-in-the-space-wall ought to have been something like the Hellmouth which causes Buffy Sommers such endless trouble. Or even like the Boom Tube from the New Gods tetralogy: a ol' hunk of plot device through which goodie toy space ships and baddie toy space ships can endlessly pour into Steve Coffin's back yard. But it never becomes particularly central to the story: Shaitan chases Rann from the Fringe to Earth and returns home with his armoured tail between his legs, and the story moves on. It's one of the things which makes Micronauts such a dizzying, exasperating, but ultimately thrilling experience. Mantlo bleeds out premises for stories; uses them once; and discards them.

On our side of the Space Wall, the Micronauts are about three inches tall. This is kind of necessary to justify the title. Things which seen small to us appear big to them. It's possible to make this kind of thing interesting. Jonathan Swift wrote a moderately well known satirical novel around the idea. Land of the Giants ran to two whole seasons. The Incredible Shrinking Man was quite scary. There is a black and white Doctor Who story called Planet of the Giants in which our heroes spend an inordinate amount of time wondering why anyone would bother to build a giant matchbox and if they are on a planet where giant ants have evolved. Within three minutes the audience is shouting "You've been shrunk you dozy buggers!" at the TV screen. It's quite fun and has a certain sense of wonder: but it helps that Ian and Barbara can be assumed to already know what a box of matches is.

Marie and Rann have never seen a lawn, or a garden swing, or a dog. Earth would be strange to them even if they were normal sized. Bug is surprised that earth-fauna is so much bigger than the forests on his own planet; they think the giant metal structure has some religious significance; and they use stun-guns on a puppy. But it all gets sorted out with a couple of pages. They encounter Steve Coffin, a semi-naked teenager, who instantly realises that they must be aliens and is only mildly surprised ("Oh wow, I mean wow.") Marie explains the entire backstory to him off panel, and he's pretty fine with it. ("We'll, sure I'll help you.") The issue ends with the lad surveying his wrecked garden and wondering what he is going to tell Dad. He decides to tell him that "It was a war, dad, between two forces from a microscopic planet called home-world. They had spaceships and ray-guns and..." His Dad believes him. He is, very conveniently, and ex-astronaut; something of a Buzz Lightyear himself. His plot arc is going to be one of the most bizarre things in the comic. 

When John Byrne rebooted Superman in 1986, he stuck with established tradition; starting the story on Krypton and following baby Kal to earth. He later said he regretted this: he wished he had started with Jonathan and Martha Kent finding their star-child, and only gradually revealed his origins. The narrative would have had the quality of surprisingness, even if the readers were not actually surprised. There is something to be said for dramatic irony. 

I think there would have been a strong argument for making Steve Coffin the viewpoint character in the Micronauts. It makes a lot more sense to see space-aliens through a teenager's eyes than teenagers through space-alien's eyes. (This is largely how Mantlo constructed Rom, showing us the Space Knight from the point of view of his human girl-friend.) We readers could have first perceived the Endeavour as strange toys clogging up Steve's lawnmower, and only gradually learned about their epic origins. Our confusion could have been his confusion; and the Microverse might have seemed more wonderful because we had never been there. Kirby showed as Darkseid from Jimmy Olsen's point of view before showing us the inside of Apokalips. Alternatively, the aliens-eye-viewpoint could have been used to defamiliarise the mundane: we could have stayed with Rann and Marie, seen a strange new world through the windscreen of the Endeaour, and only gradually working out where they had fetched up. The shifting viewpoints tend to melt the sense of wonder: no sooner have they seen the strange religious artefact than they have realised that it is a child's back-garden swing, and no sooner has Steve seen the Micronauts than he has understood that they are visiting aliens.

How many of Stan Lee's Weird Wonder Tales and Tharg's Future Shocks ended with mighty space fleets being destroyed by house-wives with fly swatters and alien diplomats deciding that ants are the dominant life-form on earth. Douglas Adams sent the whole idea up, having the battle fleets of the Vl'Hurgs and the G'Gugvuntt swallowed ("due to a terrible miscalculation of scale") by a small dog. But Mantlo is slightly too at ease with his own sense of wonder. When young Steve smashes Shaitan's ship with a garden rake, it ought to be awesome. A whole Star Destroyer full or Evil Mandalorians destroyed in a single blow; Godzilla pulling a jumbo jet out of the sky. Or else it ought to feel uncanny: a whole civilisation of tiny two inch scale human beings. But we don't really feel the narrative disjuncture between the physical size of the heroes and the narrative size of the story. We see a kid breaking a toy spaceship. Awe fails to be inspired.

*

So: a chase and a dogfight; some Lilipution silliness; and multiple statements and restatements of the backstory. But threaded through this: two tiny-small cutaways to the Microverse. Two pages in Issue #2; a single page in Issue #3. Prince Argon spread out cruciform on some luminous platform; taunted by Karza and warned that he is going to be experimented on. The old lady demanding Argon's body and being told she can't have it. The inset scenes are part of the same world, artistically and tonally, as issue #1. The Daytona Beach material seems to come from a different comic-book. 

I wonder. Did Mantlo originally envisage Micronauts # 2 as a direct continuation of Micronauts #1: swashbuckling, intrigue and exposition in a space-fantasy cosmos? Had that second issue already been drawn when Stan Lee admitted that issue #1 left him baffled; resulting in a much more mainstream second issue? And did Mantlo chop up the unpublished #2 and distribute the pages through the rewritten issues? 

There is a precedent for this sort of thing: material from an abortive Inhumans comic was repurposed as a subplot in Fantastic Four #51 - #64. I've argued that the Silver Surfer material in Fantastic Four #49 was added after the fact. 

I assume that in the Real World, the "To Be Continued" caption was a mistake. The Duchess Belladonna story was originally scheduled to come at the end of issue #2 (or perhaps to be presented as a separate "Tales of the Microverse" feature) and someone forgot to erase the lettering during the editorial process. But as a piece of text, it does seem to be an acknowledgement that what we are reading is two conceptually different comics, glued together. A warning that the comic we really want to be reading and the one Bill really wants to be writing has been carved up and served in bite sized chunks? Or even a secret message from Bill: "Stan has told me to make this comic more Marvel Style. Like he told Jack to put a robot Hulk in the Eternals. But don't worry. We'll get back to the kosmic stuff before too long."

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Micronauts #1 (continued)

V

Princess Marie is in hiding. Prince Argon is a prisoner. (“Take him to the body banks” says Karza. We're not quite sure what that means, but it doesn’t sound like anything good.) And the action cuts to a new character.

Commander Arcturus Rann. He’s an astronaut (“micronaut”) returning to earth (“homeworld”) after a voyage to the edge of the universe (“fringe of the microverse”). We see him heavily shaded in purple, alongside a robot. Then we see him heavily silhouetted in the door of his space ship, almost like the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Finally we get a good look at him, and (like Argon) he's a caricature, a cartoon: a space-hero with a jaw so square you could use it in a woodwork class.

Lucas, of course, pulled a similar structural manoeuvre. Start with a secondary character (Leia) running away from the main villain (Vader). Leave her in peril: and shift everyone's attention to the main hero (I forget his name.) Let us get to know him for a bit, and then show us how his story overlaps with hers. 

“I am glad you woke me for this” says Arcturus.

“I knew you’d enjoy seeing the real thing rather than a telepathic image” replies his robot. “You’ve waited a long time for this.”

And a narrative voice kicks in: “A long time? Yes a thousand years is a very long time to be away from one’s world, with only your ship and a roboid companion for company” [5]

And the crib sheet, if we can be bothered with the very small type, repeats the information again: Rann is “one of the first of the space-gliding Micronauts to be dispatched in suspended animation 1,000 years ago to the farthest reaches of the Microverse.”

George Lucas pruned a very complex back-story down to a very small number of upper case captions: BRAVE REBELS; EVIL GALACTIC EMPIRE; ULTIMATE WEAPON. Mantlo's story is an overgrown forest that we get lost in. But he resists the full-on info dump. He disperses information through the story, expecting the reader to connect the dots. It's a little like the rhetorical technique sometimes employed by political speech-writers. "What was it Ghandi once said...?" or "As that great champion of passive resistance put it..." go down better than "To quote a speech M.K Ghandi made in August 1942..." Let the audience finish your sentences; let them fill in the spaces you have left blank. It get's them on-side; makes them feel part of the in-crowd. 

What was it the author of Zot! told us in his seminal book on comic criticism? Comics are an invisible art; all the action comes in the space between the panels. The reader is an active participant in the creation of the story. 

So: Rann is not merely a space-explorer. He's also, at some level, a messiah. ("His return was clearly foretold on the ancient mission charts.") He has spent a thousand years in suspended animation, during which time he remained telepathically linked with Biotron, his robot companion.

It's a rather splendid science fiction idea. It could have formed the basis for an entire comic book series. An explorer whose body is frozen but whose mind is free to explore the universe, using a robot as his eyes and ears. As if that isn't enough, in the very next panel Mantlo brings in another huge space operatic concept. Rann’s spaceship was travelling at “faster than light speeds” but while he was gone, his people discovered warp drive. Aliens he made first-contact with during his millennium long voyage have obtained this faster-than-faster-than light travel and arrived home before him. [6]

 

Karza fears Rann because he is an "x-factor", not taken into account in any of his schemes; and there is going to be a Very Big Revelation in issue #11 concerning something which happened on his thousand year mission. But most of the time, he is merely the heroic Captain Kirk /  Buzz Lightyear figure, who falls in love with Princesses and saves the day. Rann's cosmic history has very little impact on the narrative: but the fact that he bursts into the comic trailing clouds of backstory is a very big part of what made the comic so mesmerising. 

Fans like complexity. Comics like Green Lantern and Legion of Superheroes with long, long histories and huge intricate casts are the ones which attract cult followings. Fan fiction was less ubiquitous in the 1970s; but the impulse to take possession of a text, to simultaneously dominate it and be dominated by it has always been there. I want to be X-Wing Blue Five flying down the Death Star Trench with Luke Skywalker; but I want to have a collection of model X-Wings and look down on the saga from above. 

Was Mantlo angling for cult status? Were his endless allusions to past histories and off-stage events a means of creating a synthetic continuity? Or did his conceptual stream outrun his ability to make up stories, so ideas just tumbled into the narrative because he couldn't keep them out? 

That would, indeed, make Micronauts a close relative of New Gods. 

VI

Relentless peril; the endless serial cycle of threat and escape. Each cliffhanger pushes us deeper into the backstory. It is hard not to be engaged. 

Rann expects to be greeted as a hero: but what he thinks is the honour guard are actually Karza’s Dog-Soldiers. He is captured. He is imprisoned. He is attacked by alien prisoners who, er, want to eat him. Two more aliens drop into the frame, from nowhere, to rescue him. 

Rann's rescuers are fairly incongruous. One is a knightly figure in red and white armour; the other is a green-skinned alien. I don’t think we immediately connect the knight with the silver and black figure we saw alongside Karza -- he's only been in the comic for one frame. But we probably grok that the knight's name, Acroyear, is the same as that of the robots who were chasing Marie and Argon on page 2. Bug, who is going to emerge as a comedic “artful dodger” figure in later issues is on this first appearance, a completely generic Little Green man: the kind of human-in-make-up you’d have met in Season Two of Star Trek.

Was this slightly unlikely friendship between a giant space-knight and a little-space thief suggested by the (at the time) equally unlikely friendship between the cowboy space pirate and the giant chess playing gorilla? Or does Mantlo just need to squeeze two more action figures into the story? Acroyear looks quite a lot like his model: we would not know that Bug was Galactic Warrior unless Mantlo had told us so. The Galactic Warrior figure did come with a curious bucket-shaped helmet like the one Bug wears (very valuable to collectors as they most often got lost). Some iterations of the figurine were green.

Rann is surprised that there are Bugs and Acroyears on Homeworld, because he thinks he discovered them during his infinitely extended space sojourn. But his surprise is almost immediately undercut with a revelation. We readers already know that Baron Karza is the bad-guy. He’s been mentioned, oh, three or four times already. But when Bug mentions his name, Mantlo hits us with another Hand of Kwll moment

“Baron Karza? Doctor Karza of the science academy? But he was my professor, 1,000 years ago.”

But he was my professor. 

It is not quite up there with no-Luke-I-am-you-father. But it did come two years earlier.

VII

Princess Marie and Commander Rann both have mechanical companions. Rann's companion, the one he mind-linked with during his voyage, is called Biotron. He is quite tall and has human features. Marie's is shorter and less anthropomorphic and is called Microtron. [7] The crib sheet says that he is her “jester, servant, tutor and guardian” although he does very little in this first issue. Both of them are modelled very closely on the original action-figures, and there is very little that Golden can do to prevent them looking like oversized toys. They will inevitably form a friendship, and it is impossible not too look at the double-act without thinking of Artoo Detoo and See Threepio. However, Biotron is not particularly pompous and Microtron is not especially flighty. 

Artoo and Threepio were referred to as "droids" which is presumably an abbreviation of "android".  Android literally means "man-shaped", in the way that "ovoid" means "egg-shaped", but science fiction fans would naturally take it to mean "a human shaped robot". See Threepio is arguably an android: Artoo Deetoo decidedly isn't. [8] 

Microtron and Biotron are referred to as "roboids". Mantlo says in passing that "roboids" have "become a synthesis of man and machine" -- or, in other words, cyborgs. [9] I suppose that "roboid" must mean "shaped like a robot", which they unquestionably are. C.P Scott would presumably have said that no good can come of a word which is half Latin and half Czech. 

On page 10 Microtron is seen operating Marie as if she were a puppet. I had to read this section several times to work out what was supposed to be going on. It appears that Karza uses "show dolls"  — humanoid robots operated by other robots -- as a form of entertainment. By pretending to be a show-doll, Marie hopes to gain access to the arena and rescue Argon. It seems a lot of trouble to go to to establish the Marie/Marionette pun. 

But that is how Rann first sees Marie: a figure being manipulated by a roboid. And this is surely rather reminiscent of Artoo Deetoo projecting the image of Princess Leia for the benefit of Luke Skywalker. 

“She must be real” says Commander Rann when he sees her.  “She’s beautiful.”

VIII

Steve Gerber complained that Marvel comics had to include one actual fight scene: not an action sequence or a confrontation, a fight. The fights in Howard the Duck became intentionally silly and gratuitous, both as an in-joke and as a protest. Stan Lee himself affected to regard “plot” as the annoying preliminary you had to rush through in order to get to the punch-up.

In one sense, Micronauts # 1 has been nothing but a sequence of confrontations and chases and escapes. But pages 12-17 are a relatively by-numbers comic book action sequence. Karza puts all the prisoners in the arena and releases a giant “death tank” that they are supposed to fight. The Time Traveller — the glowy angel that Argon summonsed by unspecified means — materialises again and somehow causes an explosion, giving all the good guys a chance to get back to Rann’s spaceship. The aliens who wanted Rann for lunch are killed, unmourned, by the robot. The flying Acroyears come down from the sky, and we finally get a good look at them: their heads are the same shape as the wings on Acroyear’s helmet, but otherwise they look like completely different toys. Everyone runs away, back to Rann’s space ship, where Biotron is waiting for them. They escape, and make for “the fringe”. 

Rann has already talked, several pages earlier, about having reached "the fringe" on his first voyage. A writer would probably not use jargon so consistently if he were making it up as he went along. Consecutive captions say that the Endeavour is slower than its pursuers, and that it is travelling faster than the speed of light: "faster than light" having been established as meaning "relatively slow". I remain in awe of Mantlo's world-building.  

There is one more twist. Karza reveals that he never intended his ships to catch our heroes. Because Rann is the x-factor that could mess up his plans, he needs to know what he is going to do next. “There is an unknown at work here and that we cannot fathom must sometimes be made to reveal itself.”

He let them go. It’s the only explanation for the ease of their escape. Bill Mantlo had never seen Star Wars.

IX

If your first encounter with Star Wars was through a computer game or a guidebook or the prequels, then you have never seen Star Wars. If you went into Episodefouranewhope knowing in advance that Star Destroyers are bigger than Rebel Blockade Runners then you have never seen Star Wars. If when Darth Vader walked down the corridor you knew he was a Sith Lord named Anakin, you have never seen Star Wars. 

This is not gate-keeping. You can perfectly well be a fan of the Star Wars Saga without having seen Star Wars. English Literature survives quite happily even though most of us have never read Macbeth for the first time. But the aesthetic of Star Wars, and therefore the aesthetic of the Micronauts depends on there being oceans and continents of stuff about which the audience doesn't have the faintest idea.

You can't enjoy a puzzle if you already know the solution. 

This is not, incidentally, true of every movie and every book. The first Batman movie, and arguably the first Superman movie, rather strongly assumed that you knew the basic facts about the characters in advance. Sophocles would have written Oedipus Rex different if he thought there would one day be people who didn't know who the king murdered and who the king married. I appear to have just compared a bad Tim Burton movie with arguably the most significant secular text in the western canon. 

On page 16 of Mirconauts # 1, Acroyear gets to deliver arguably the best line in the whole comic. 

“I have a message for that traitor prince you serve" he says "Tell him there is a blood feud between us, and I will have his head.”

This is the culmination of a series of references to Acroyears that run laterally through the comic. Once you know what you are looking for, it is perfectly coherent and relatively easy to unpick.

Page 2: The good guys are are chased by flying acroyears.

Page 5: We meet Karza’s armoured councillor, Prince Shaitan.

Page 9: We meet an armoured knight, simply named Acroyear.

Page 14: As Acroyear starts to fight the death robot, Karza says to Shaitan “Your estranged brother, is he not?”

Page 15: We finally get a good look at the flying acroyears, who Shaitan describes as "my people".

Page 16, Acroyear delivers the line about the traitor prince. (It isn't clear if the message is going to be delivered or not, since Acroyear appears to have smashed the acroyear into little tiny pieces: a textbook example of shooting first and asking questions later.) 

None of this is particularly baffling or hard to follow: and the crib sheet sums it up admirably. Acroyear is the prince of the acroyears, his throne has been taken by Shaitan who has allowed Karza to use his people as shock troops.

But this summary falsifies the actual experience of reading the comic. The information doesn't come in exposition or flashback: it comes as six dots of information; one thread of a back-story; a sub-plot in a sub-plot, part of the rhubarb-rhubarb background noise while in the foreground luminous Time Traveller's explode gigantic killer robots in toy arenas.

The story of how Prince Space Knight regained the throne from Evil Turncoat Brother could easily have sustained a five act tragedy or a three volume epic. (And we haven't even got to the part about exile and migration and making friends with a talking planet.) But the specific power of Micronauts # 1 is that a whole Arthurian/Shakespearean space-saga takes place in parenthesis. Acroyear is simply the action figure to the left of the Space Glider action figure in the toy space ship; best mates with the Galactic Warrior action figure. And yet he drags behind him a whole separate mythology. Mantlo intends, I think, to do the same thing with Bug, but Planet of The Insect Theives never quite becomes interesting enough.

The Acroyears are not Jedi Knights. They might possibly be Mandalorians. John Favereu must have read Micronauts. He’s a Star Wars fan, he’s our age, and it was all there was. But the feud between Acroyear and Shaitan functions in a similar way to the feud between old Ben and Darth Vader in that first movie. It's the centre of its own plot, but on the margins of this one; the protrusion into this story of one that seems older and bigger and part of a different world. 

Micronauts # 1, like Star Wars, has a clear, linear narrative arc. People are captured and escape and recaptured and escape again. It begins with separate characters fleeing the bad guy; and ends with all the characters fleeing the bad guy together. But it is driven by social and chronological connections; which are revealed and created as the chase rushes on. The characters are introduced to us through their relationships; they form new relationships across the groups as the story develops and we gradually learn about the way they are related through their histories: 

 

Marie and Argon: siblings. 

Acroyear and Shaitan: siblings.

Acroyear and Bug: friends. 

Microtron: Marie's roboid.

Biotron: Rann's robot. 

Microtron and Biotron: Make friends because they are both robots. 
Rann and Acroyear and Bug: Make friends because they in prison together

Marie and Rann: Make friends because she's a lady and he's a man. 

Rann turns out to be Karza's pupil.

Rann turns out to be the child of Marie's gods. 
Shaitan turns out to have betrayed the Acroyears to Karza.

Time Traveller turns out to have a mysterious connection with Argon and Rann.

English teachers sometimes draw diagrams to explain Shakespeare's plots: who kills who and who falls in love with who and who is related to who. We feel we should be able to step back from Micronauts and see the whole pattern; but the pattern keeps shifting. It isn't that it feels real. It's that we feel it would feel real if we could only get under the surface and work out what was going on. But Mantlo won't let us. The story is too big.

X

What have I said? Have I said anything at all? Perhaps Micronauts reminds me of Star Wars because I read them at the same age. Perhaps Star Wars reminds me of Micronauts because they are both space operas and all space opera is pretty much the same? But then I read Doc Smith and liked Doc Smith and Doc Smith pretty much defined space opera and anyone who thinks that Doc Smith is anything like Star Wars hasn’t learned to read. Am I really just saying that George Lucas and Bill Mantlo both overwhelmed us by the sheer quantity of derivative fantasy ideas they lazily stuffed into one book?  But that gets us into the Campbell question: are some ideas powerful because they have been used before; or do ideas get reused because they are powerful? There was a point in my life when I would squee for any vaguely mythological scene involving wizards and swords and magic: Trebor refreshers, Thundercats, T.H White, Richard Wagner, it made no odds. Robots and horses generate a certain fizz; however little you like power-politics, it's hard not to love it when Frank Herbert gives you a vast galactic empire where they still use swords. We have seen that in Britain, at any rate, Micronauts shared space with Starlord and Thanos and the Sword in the Star. Swords-and-science wasn't invented in 1977: Michael Moorcock did it before George Lucas and Edgar Rice Borroughs did it before Moorcock. But we didn't talk about Space Fantasy before Star Wars. 

Could Mantlo keep it up? Yes, and no. The next few issues will be superhero comics, set on earth, with the Microverse itself reduced to marginal background information. But around issue 8 earth and the Microverse will come together with the arrival and immediate departure of an absurd, brilliant, irrelevant superhero. And then we will return to the Microverse; actually visit the Acroyear homeworld; and reach a conclusion which not only knocks the first issue into a micrococked hat, but (there are days of the week when I am tempted to say) out-Lucases Lucas and even out-Kirbys Kirby, 

[5] Stan Lee, famously, affected the voice of an avuncular huckster in his captions, addressing the readers as "gang" or "true believers" and treating the story as a thing he was making up. Mantlo's voice is more like Lee's hipper acolytes, writing captions which muse to themselves or address the reader.“A long time? Yes, a thousand years...” “Rebellion; it is not a very lovely word...” It seems to be the wrong voice: this is a story which needs to be declaimed in Star Wars crawl, or maybe the breathless wonder of a story-so-far radio introduction. But it is the voice of 1970s Marvel Comic; quiet; mature; serious. We are a long way from the days when peerless pilgrims proclaimed ever page a pulse pounding battle of the century. Micronauts is not camp; or at any rate, it is camp in a completely different way.

[6] Mantlo seems to have pinched the idea from the 1969 version of Guardians of the Galaxy, which has almost nothing to do with the movie version. Vance Astro was supposed to be travelling to Alpha Centauri in cold storage, but finds that faster-than-light humans have already colonised the place before he gets there. 

[7] Everyone knows that they are inhabitants of the Microverse; Rann calls himself a Micronaut; and Marie's robot is called Microtron. I suppose we have to regard "micro" as a word like "smurf" which means something untranslatable in the source-language. 

[8] In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep Dekker refers to the replicants as "andys" which I have always taken rather personally. 

[9] Did anyone ever find out what Threepio meant by 'human/cyborg relations'?

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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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Micronauts # 1

I

Two nobles are fleeing an insurgency.

They are captured and imprisoned by a black-armoured villain.

A space-traveller returns from a long voyage.

Instead of being welcomed as a hero, he is arrested and thrown into prison.

The space-traveller is menaced by other prisoners: but two inmates come to his aid.

The space traveller, the two friendly prisoners and one of the nobles are thrown into a gladiatorial arena.

They escape, and flee in the space-traveller's ship, pursued by the dark lord's minions.

That, in essence, is the plot of Micronauts #1. 

Comic books have been built on flimsier first issues.

I said that I had thought of calling this essay “What did Star Wars look like in 1978?” But it should really be called “How does Micronauts make me feel.” Or, more expansively: “How Micronauts made me feel in 1978; how it makes me feel now; how that feeling reminds me of how Star Wars made me feel in 1977 and what that tells us about Star Wars as a cultural phenomenon and the extent to which Bill Mantlo, and, for that matter, George Lucas, had the faintest idea about what they were doing." 

Which is why I have gone with a briefer and more descriptive title.

II

"For the love of Dallan!" "Burn the elitist swine!" Telepathic horses. The Enigma Force. Body banks. A black armoured villain who can make his followers immortal and has ruled the universe for a thousand years. Everyone is running away from everyone else, shouting fragments of a backstory at each other. Each piece of action is interrupted by a different piece of action.  Every piece of exposition is cut short. The setting is taken for granted; alluded to; only partially explained. Genres clash. The nobles are riding horses and wearing Napoleonic uniforms; but they are chased by cyberpunk stormtroopers (“Dog Soldiers”) and flying robots (“Acroyears”). 

How does Micronauts #1 make me feel?

Exhilarated. Confused. Dizzy and cross and intoxicated at the same time.

Stan Lee reportedly found it baffling and asked Mantlo to add a crib sheet. This actually makes matters worse: it references characters who barely feature in the first issue and foreshadows events which won't come into the story for months. But the added confusion adds to the compelling fascination. T.S Eliot's explanatory notes notoriously failed to explain the Wasteland: but smart critics see that failure as part of the poem's impact. 

"Did you really just compare Bill Mantlo's Micronauts to T.S Eliot's Wasteland, Andrew?"

"Yes. Yes, I suppose I did."

"Might you argue that there is something post-modern about the way Micronauts and Star Wars appropriate images from widely different narrative sources and allow the juxtaposed cultural symbols to generate new levels of meaning?"

"Yes. I suppose that is the kind of thing I might well argue."

III

On page 2, one of the horse-riding royals — Princess Marie, she is called — exclaims "For the love of Dallan!”

On page 3 her brother exclaims "By Dallan!"

On page 5, discovering that her family have been murdered, Marie says "Sepsis have mercy!"

Again, on page 16: "For Sepsis sake!" and "Dallan and Sepsis!"

I don’t think we pay much attention to this kind of thing. Superman occasionally says by rao because he isn’t allowed to say damn. Judge Dredd says drokk and grud and the crew of the Red Dwarf say smeg. It’s part of the texture of the comic, a linguistic tick, like a Dalek saying rels instead of "hours" or a Smurf smurfing smurf when he smurfs to smurf. [1]

But on page 27, while everyone is running from the gladiatorial arena to a waiting escape starship, Commander Arcturus Rann — the returning space traveller — suddenly asks Princess Marie who Dallan and Sepsis were.

It falls to Time Traveller, a luminous science genie who Prince Argon summonsed up on page 5 and who hasn't done anything useful since to explain that Dallan and Sepsis were the first to defy Baron Karza (the dark lord) a thousand years ago, and that they have since been deified. 

"By all that's holy", exclaims Arcturus, who is also not allowed to say swears "They were my parents!"

Michael Moorcock’s Corum spends an entire trilogy wielding a magic item called the Hand of Kwll. [2] In the final chapter of the third volume, a one-handed god named Kwll shows up. I distinctly remember reading this chapter: I was in the waiting room on Oakleigh Park station, very probably on my way to Wood Green to exchange a book token for volumes four, five and six. My jaw dropped in a way that it hadn't since Cloud City and almost never since. It didn't particularly occur to me that Moorcock was making it up as he went along.

Neil Gaiman has rather based a career on showing readers' a funeral in issue ten and making them wait until issue twenty before letting them know who died; or alluding to a messy break up this year but not dramatising the actual love affair until the year after next. Dave Sim made us wait ten years to find out why Cerebus wasn’t allowed to look at the President’s ankle. It took George Lucas thirty-five years to attach any concrete concepts to words like Clone Wars and Kessel Run. [3] 

Some writers create whole worlds of facts and gradually uncover them in a kind of narrative striptease. Say what you like about J.K Rowling's prose style and her sexual politics, but you can't fault her card-index system. Other writers consciously throw out evocative words because they sound good without having any clear sense of what they mean. Two thirds of what we laughingly call the Cthulhu mythos started out as random collections of evocative syllables. And some writers doodle out lore-babble and think up reference points later on. “By the dread Dormammu!” was a cool thing for Doctor Strange to say. After few months Stan Lee decided it could also be the name of an actual bad-guy. Judge Dredd's universe eventually acquired a church of Grud for him to blaspheme against.

But there is something unusually breathless about the speed with which the set-ups and pay-offs pour off the pages of Micronauts #1. The casual decoding of lore is an architectural principle across a whole comic-book, as if decades of continuity were being retconned into twenty pages. It’s thrillingly frustrating and frustratingly thrilling.

My father fought in the Clone Wars. Gil Galad was an elven King. May Dallan preserve us. By all that's holy; they were my parents.

IV

Fleeing from the flying robots and stormtroopers, our heroes find their way to some kind of refuge or safe house.

“Shelter” says Argon “I gave Oberon free rein, and he led us here straightway.”

“It was the telepath training he received in father’s stables, Argon” exposits Marie.

We are only on page 4. We haven’t really worked out who the goodies and the baddies are. But we spend a whole panel finding out the name of Argon’s horse.

And the fact that he is a telepathic horse.

Which is important because….

Because….

At the bottom of page 6, we meet Baron Karza, the Big Bad, for the first time. He’s the guy in the Darth Vader armour off the cover. He’s squished into a single, tall panel, his left arm cut off by the frame. Behind, partially obscured, is a figure in black and silver armour who calls him Your Eminence. [4]

We’ve had a chase; the goodies have been captured; and the bad-guy’s leader has walked on stage. That’s very much how first acts are supposed to work. But Karza's first appearance has no visual punch. It’s almost like artist Michael Golden is giving all the characters equal prominence, because he doesn’t know who is going to be important as the story develops. Howard Chaykin, who had to illustrate Star Wars without having seen the movie, had a similar problem. Lucas gives Vader one of the all-tine classic entrances: but in the comic book adaptation he is just suddenly there.

Karza, what we see of him, looks pretty impressive. Black armour; off-set by big red circles on his chest. Golden is following the design of the action figure: I think the red dots were actually connection points for accessories. The chrome shorts look odd: but better heroes and better villains have been undermined by their choice of underwear. 

But there is something wrong with his legs. They are thin. They bend the wrong way. And there are at least three of them. 

Realisation dawns. He has hooves instead of feet. He may be this comic's Darth Vader analogue; but he’s a Darth Vader analogue who is also a centaur.

And why not?

The next time he appears, on page 11, Karza is slouching on a throne; the other armoured figure (“Shaitan”) is next to him; and a green monk (“Shadow Priest”) sits in between them. 

But hang on. Doesn’t he now have…ordinary human legs?

So: let's get this straight. In this world, Darth Vader is sometimes a centaur.

And sometimes not a centaur.

Because… Because…

You could buy an accessory for the Karza action figure: a black horse called Andromeda. And you could buy a very similar white horse called Oberon who went with Force Commander. (Force Commander is what the toy was called: Prince Argon is Mantlo’s coinage.) You can take the legs off Karza and Force Commander and the heads off the two horses and recombine them into Centaurs. The figures, unlike the vehicles, were held together by magnets: I don't think you could put Karza's head on one of the robots even if you wanted to. 

So: are we assumed to be so conversant with the toys that "the bad guy is sometimes a horse" can be taken for granted? Is Mantlo foreshadowing? (Argon will be forcibly turned into a centaur in issue 5.) Or maybe he is deliberately trying to give the comic a dream-like quality?

But it’s still an odd decision. The villain is a centaur. The hero has a magic telepathic pony. We start with a chase scene. But the horsy villain leaves it to his Dog Solidiers and Acroyears to do the actual pursuit.

The Acroyears are shown in extreme long-shot. They are not much more than doodles; tiny birds with v-shaped heads and frisbees on their arms. The Dogs Soldiers and insurgents are inked in solid black (silhouettes) or heavily coloured in yellow and blue. In many panels they are so distant that they appear as tiny figures; we might even say, as toys. We do get a look at a Dog Soldier on page 3: he turns out to be a very unmemorable cyberpunk riot policeman; but we don't properly see the Acroyears until page 15. 

Michael Golden is a well respected artist; but he seems overwhelmed by the material. The comic feels blurred; schematic; it only gradually and partially comes into focus. When we get headshots of the main characters, they are exaggerated, caricatured, cartoon-like. Prince Argon on page 3 is a generic olden days character, somewhere between a toy soldier and a French Legionaire out of Carry On, Follow That Camel. Hardware and aliens come at us with joyful abandon, but we can't latch onto any of them. 

What does Micronauts #1 feel like? Like a kid who has been let loose in a toyshop, desperately trying to push all the buttons before closing time. 

(continues)

[1] Karza says that it is twenty four xats since his insurrection. This refers either to his coming to power a thousand years ago, or his uprising on Homeworld the previous afternoon, so we can categorically say that one xat represents a period between one hour and four hundred and sixteen years.

[2] Corum presumably doesn't use Latin orthography, so it is hard to know what the lack of a vowel represents -- even if it was written Kw'll we'd still have to say "Kwill" or "Kwell". I think I pronounce apostrophes and blank spaces "uh". Or maybe Corum is Jewish and writes the divine name Kw--ll?

[3] For two movies and six years, Jabba the Hutt was just a name. Spoiling the big reveal in Return of the Jedi is not the worst sin of the special editions. 

[4] Which is an Ecclesiastical form of address. It’s what you call a Cardinal. The proper address for a Baron is “Your Lordship”.

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.

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider backing me on Patreon (pledging £1 each time I publish an article.) 

 Pledge £1 for each essay.