The Mighty Isis #7. Feel the Fangs of the Serpent King!

There was a time, long ago, when you could say you were a big fan of Isis without fearing the CIA were going to monitor all your phone calls from now on.

And that time was the 1970s when the heroine of that name was on our TV screens and in our comics.

She was like Wonder Woman but Egyptian instead of Greek, and obscure instead of iconic.

Granted when I say, "Our," I don't remember her ever being on my TV screen but I did, at least, experience her comic book incarnation, as I had a massive two issues of her mag.

Thinking about it, two issues was quite a lot, as the book only lasted for eight before folding.

Filled with the magic of Ancient Egypt, fully embracing bondage and supported by its own TV show, why did such a book fail? Why?

There's only one way to find out and that's to revisit the earliest of those two issues I possessed.

Fresh from having dealt with some threat to humanity, the mighty Isis is floating around the skies, woodland and cities of America, worrying about who she really is and why she keeps being rude to people, when Rick Mason, friend of her alter-ego Andrea Thomas, decides to investigate from where this mysterious heroine came.

So, he goes to the local museum and reads up on her, discovering, via a parchment, that she's probably the reincarnation of a young woman who once helped a benign wizard defeat Serpenotep the evil sorcerer who'd briefly taken over the land of the Nile.

The only problem is that, having worked all that out, Rick decides to totally ignore the parchment's warning to never say out loud a deadly phrase it contains, and the next thing he knows, he's been possessed by Serpenotep who's been lurking inside a nearby model pyramid for a few thousand years.

Admittedly, on the cover, it says one thousand years, meaning he was imprisoned in 977 AD, which suggests a little more research might have been needed from whoever worded the cover.

Suitably liberated, Serpenotep sets out to get his revenge on Isis, for trapping him in the model, and sets about turning innocent people into snakes.

Needless to say, our heroine isn't standing for that kind of nonsense and it's not long before she and her foe are conducting a battle of wits in the museum, one she wins, thanks to her knowing more about vacuums than he knows about plastic.

However, as she departs with Rick, she does so unaware that Serpenotep has control of his body and that Rick's mind is now trapped in the model pyramid.

Well this all sounds fine, so, why did it fail?

I think the fairly obvious answer is it's all far too low-key. Isis spends all her time, between fights, either fretting over her true nature or being haughty with mortals. She's nothing like as bad as the Silver Surfer but, then again, her agonising doesn't have anything like the same emotional content as his did. While he was always wracked with anguish over his psychological crises, she's just sort of a bit mopey about them.

There's also a problem that she seems to have no direct emotional link to her supporting cast of three characters, even though one of them is her mother, another is the man who loves her and the final one is her oldest enemy. They might as well be strangers for all the difference it makes.

On the plus side, her self-questioning and sense of alienation does seek to develop her more as a character than I would have expected from a spin-off of a Saturday morning children's TV show. It just doesn't develop her in a way that's particularly compelling.

In the end, writer Jack C Harris and artists Mike Vosburg and Frank Chiarmonte have given us a competent but workmanlike comic whose protagonist doesn't really engage us. There's nothing actively bad about the tale but there's nothing that makes you particularly want to find out what happens next either.

Ultimately, it all feels a bit depressed. Imagine Marvin the Paranoid Android created a comic. That's sort of what we've got here.