Creatures on the Loose #18 - Gullivar Jones on Mars, Part 3.

The last we saw of Gullivar Jones, he was still stuck on Mars and about to be fed to a giant sea monster called Phra, by a bunch of spider-bat-men who clearly have too much free time on their hands.

I think we've all been there.

The pair of them having been grabbed by Phra, he and the captive Wing-Man Chak are taken to Phra's secret lair where, while the monster's napping, Jones switches on a handily-placed computer that promptly tells him the entire history of Mars.

It seems that, long ago, disaster befell that world's inhabitants and so they fled their cities and went their separate ways, before evolving into the many and varied forms that now inhabit the planet.

That dealt with, Jones soon makes short work of the newly awoken Phra, and he and Chak walk off to have a sulk about things.

It's clearly an issue for major changes, as, after producing just two instalments of the strip, the original creative team of Roy Thomas and Gil Kane are gone, replaced by George Effinger, Gerry Conway and Ross Andru.

To be honest, I 'm not sure I know who George Effinger is but Gerry Conway's fingerprints are all over the story, with Jones speaking in the same sort of way Conway usually had Peter Parker speaking.

It has to be said, this is vaguely annoying. It's one thing for a socially inept youth in New York to be talking like that, it's a whole other thing for a military veteran on an alien planet to be doing so.

As he did with The Amazing Spider-Man, Ross Andru makes the strip's move away from Kane virtually seamless, as his style's not a million miles distant from his predecessor's and, in this issue, there are places where he seems to be deliberately aping Kane's style. Either that, or Kane did some uncredited touching-up on some of the panels, in the name of consistency.

To be honest, as giant menaces go, Phra's something of a wash-out, being stupid, clumsy, ineffectual and lazy in equal parts. The truth is he spends most of the story asleep before being blown up. Clearly, you just can't get good monsters these days.

On the other hand, it is nice to see him appear on the cover's top left corner box, rather than Jones being there - a pleasing nod to the title's origins as a monster mag, rather than a super-hero one.

Something that's become blatant by this issue is that the good guys all look like Earth people and the bad guys decidedly don't. This feeling's strengthened when it's revealed that Chak, the only nice Wing-Man we've encountered so far in the strip, just happens to have a human head, and his pterodactyl face is in fact a mask designed to conceal his true appearance. You can't help feeling that, in the interests of tolerance and open mindedness, it would have been nice for him to be depicted as having a pterodactyl head just like his more morally dubious brethren.

But that's enough of him. The person you have to most feel sorry for is poor old Princess Heru. Just two issues after Gullivar Jones was announcing his undying love for her, he seems to have now forgotten all about her.

As the last time we saw her, she was being abducted to be handed over to a ravenous ravisher, of ruddy complexion and no-doubt ruddier mind-set, such behaviour on Jones' part seems most ungallant, to say the very least.

Creatures on the Loose #17 - Gullivar Jones on Mars, Part 2.

Last week, we saw how newly-discharged Earth soldier Gullivar Jones came to be on Mars, doing the John Carter thing.

This week, it's time to see what progress he makes now he's got there.

And it has to be said, he doesn't make a lot.

Having been dumped, unconscious, on a funeral barge as it makes its way down a Martian river, Gullivar recovers just in time to fight some giant caterpillars and then get captured by some spider-bat-men who then proceed to offer him and a captive pterodactyl man up as a snack for their giant god Phra.

According to Wikipedia, the reason Gullivar Jones never caught on like John Carter did was because, in the original book, he was a bit of a failure, losing fights, left, right and centre while getting pushed around by events rather then pushing them around.

And you can certainly see signs of it here. He starts off unconscious, then gets bitten by a giant caterpillar then loses consciousness then loses a fight with the spider-bat-men and then finishes off by being offered up as a takeaway. He might have super-strength while he's on Mars and have combat training but he does come across as a man in severe need of a good rescuing.

On the plus side, it's all non-stop drama and, as before, Gil Kane's art is excellent, making the strip memorable and worth reading for that alone. We also get a suitably cliff-hanging ending with what looks like the sort of monster Marvel loved to throw at us at every opportunity in the late 1950s and early 1960s. So, at least it seems we have reason to look forward to next issue.

Creatures on the Loose #16 - Gullivar Jones on Mars.

It always seemed to me that there was one obvious drawback to getting super-powers.

Which was that, to get them, you first had to actually do something.

For instance, you had to steal a rocket ship and fly it through cosmic rays. Or you had to build a gamma bomb and then let it explode at you. Or you had to attend a science show and let spiders bite you.

If you wanted lots of powers, you had to do all these things and take refuge from aliens, in a cave, whilst banging a stick against a wall.

Reader, you know by now that banging a stick against a wall is beneath the dignity of a man of my quality, no matter how strong it might make me.

You can imagine, therefore, just how impressed I was, as a child, with Gullivar Jones.

After all, he managed to get his super-powers just by walking down the street.

Admittedly, he then got sent to Mars - which is a bit of a downside - and had to fight big red lobster men but he did at least get to snog a princess, so it wasn't all bad news.

I first came across Gullivar Jones in the pages of Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes, a mag that seems to be getting a zillion and one mentions round here lately.

And I was impressed at once.

Not only did it have the lazy person's guide to getting super-powers but it was drawn by Gil Kane in a genre I always felt suited him best.

But of course, those tales were just reprints. Gullivar Jones made his real Marvel Comics debut in Creatures on the Loose #16 and what happens in that issue is that Jones, having just quit the army, is leaving the officers' club for the last time, when a man on a flying disc descends from the heavens, declares Jones is going to be a saviour and sends him back through time to Mars to fight evil wherever he finds it.

You will of course be aware this is remarkably similar to John Lennon's claim that the Fab Four got their name when a man descended on a flaming pie and told them to call themselves the Beatles. Whether it's the same man in both cases, I'm not at all sure.

To be honest, anyone with any sense, upon arriving against his will on Mars, would promptly burst into tears and be too busy sobbing to do anything.

But Gullivar Jones isn't just any man.

He's an interfering busybody.

And so, the instant he arrives, he leaps into action to rescue the aforementioned princess from the aforementioned lobster men and then gets to road-test her tonsils before she's snatched by pterodactyl people and he's left, out cold, on a funeral barge and heading towards his doom.

This of course all makes Jones sound like a rip-off of John Carter but the magic of Wikipedia tells me he was originally created by Edwin Lester Arnold in 1905 and therefore predates Carter by a good seven years. The fact that Carter's had a string of books and a movie made about him, and Jones hasn't, only goes to show there's no justice in the world.

In terms of characterisation, in this issue, we get to learn next to nothing about Jones, and even less about the Princess, so it's all a bit shallow - and, to be honest, feels more DC in that regard than Marvel. But it's beautifully drawn and zips along. And, most of all, with its strange alien world to explore, it holds out the promise of more action, adventure and bizarreness to come in the very next issue.

Does it produce that bizarreness?

We'll have to find out next weekend when I take a look at that very next issue.

And, if Brian Blessed isn't in it as a hawk man, I shall very disappointed with them.

Man-Wolf. Creatures on the Loose #34.

As we all know, Marvel had not one but two werewolf "heroes" in the 1970s. Why? I'm not too sure but clearly they must've felt you can never have too much fur in this world.

Of the pair, I must confess I always preferred Man-Wolf.

Admittedly, the more commercially successful Werewolf by Night had the draw of Mike Ploog's artwork but, somehow, although I had a number of issues of that title (so it must have appealed to me), the tales have never stuck in my mind and, until that day when I repurchase them, I'm not going to actually remember what was in them.

Maybe it was because the Werewolf didn't look like a werewolf, he always looked like he had a coconut for a head. Sadly, I suspect the adventures of Coconut by Night wouldn't have been greeted with the same enthusiasm.

But Man-Wolf?

Now that was a different matter.

Originally drawn by the mighty Gil Kane for Amazing Spider-Man #124, like Gil Kane's Man-Beast in Warlock it actually looked like a wolf. It also wore the remnants of a bright yellow outfit, making it a super-hero werewolf. Not only that but, unlike the thoroughly supernatural - and therefore trad - Werewolf by Night, it was a science fiction werewolf, being astronaut John Jameson.

In truth, apart from those Spider-Man appearances, the only Man-Wolf tale I ever had was this one, Creatures on the Loose #34 but what an issue it was. Drawn beautifully by George Perez and scripted by the ever-reliable Dave Kraft, I always thought it was a cracker as the titular terror encounters a secret criminal organisation led by the bloke who runs the local petrol station.

Exactly what the secret criminal organisation actually does, I'm not that sure but they're clearly up to no good and my favourite part's always been when the one legged bad guy's about to shove our hero off a cliff while declaring he's not going to stand there outlining his plans for half an hour and give Jameson time to escape like they do in James Bond movies.

It did, at the time, seem a most refreshing attitude for a bad guy and one that most of Marvel's villains could learn a lesson and a half from.