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.

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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 #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.

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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 #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."

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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