Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #2 - War Toy.

I'll be honest. Tonight, I was going to cave in to public demand and see what our favourite DC heroes were up to exactly fifty years ago.

The only problem is that when I tried to write the post, I couldn't think of a single thing to say about any of the covers in question.

It really does smack you in the face how undynamic and uninteresting DC covers from that era were compared to their livelier Marvel counterparts.

But, if you want to see DC's covers from September of 1964, you can do so by clicking on this very link.

 If you can think of anything interesting to say about any of them, you're free to post those thoughts in the comment box below and succeed where I failed.

In the meantime, having been defeated by DC, I shall retreat into the familiar and descend into the happy days of Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes.

As you may know, the UK Planet of the Apes comic was in the habit of reprinting sci-fi tales from US Marvel's black and white range; and one of the more memorable of those tales was a thing called War Toy.

It's the tale of a robot created to fight in wars, so that people don't have to.

Sadly, the military give him short shrift and he has nothing to do until aliens invade Australia, at which point he's sent into combat and plays a major part in the Earth's victory.

That's the happy part.

The unhappy part is that no sooner is that war over than the military dump him again and he's left to try and make a life for himself on Civvie Street.

Having been created purely to fight in wars, he fails miserably to do this and, eventually, his parts breaking down, he's taken into hospital where we find him on his death bed.

It's not what you'd call a happy tale. In fact, it's what you'd call downright angry, clearly meant to draw parallels with the treatment of human veterans of war, trained to serve their country and then forgotten and neglected once the fighting's over.

I had always assumed it was an adaptation from a literary short story but it seems, from the credits, that it's an original tale, in which case, all credit is due to writer Tony Isabella and artists George Perez and Rico Rival for creating one of Marvel's more memorable 1970s tales.

I suspect I'm not the only one who found it memorable because the other thing I've always assumed about it is that the movie Short Circuit was to some degree inspired by it, as there are some fairly obvious similarities.

Sheffield's Most Wanted. Part 16: Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #4.

When I was a  child, I got the idea into my head that science-fiction was a big, grown-up thing for grown-ups and it might therefore hurt my little brain to read it.

As nearly all my favourite movies were science fiction films and all my favourite comics were, to some degree, based on sci-fi principles, I have no idea where I got this notion from. But, somehow, it meant I didn't register those films or comics as being science fiction.

I think I'd decided that for something to qualify as sci-fi, it had to be pretentious. As the things I liked were mostly not pretentious, they therefore couldn't be sci-fi. Clearly, children, like Mancunian criminals, often see things in strange ways.

Regardless of my fear of science fiction hurting my brain, whenever I saw this issue advertised I wanted it.

Bafflingly, I did see it in a shop once but it never occurred to me to actually buy it.

While a lot of the tales from Unknown Worlds found their way into Marvel UK's weekly Planet of the Apes comic, a quick look at its entry on the Grand Comics Database tells me the only story title in this issue that rings a bell is something called Kick the Can. If it was indeed reprinted in Planet of the Apes, I have a feeling it involved an alien, a human and them firing ray guns at each other in between childhood flashbacks.

Of course, the title also made me think of Suzi Quatro's Can the Can and I shall therefore always associate it with leather catsuits.

But then, to be honest, I associate everything in life with leather catsuits.

It gives me pleasure to do so.