The Golden Voyage of Sinbad - Worlds Unknown #7.

Apart from Rod Stewart, has there ever been a more famous sailor than Sinbad; that daring explorer who never turned down a chance to tangle with giant eggs?

There are those who'll tell you he was Chinese. There are those who'll tell you he was from the Middle East. There are even some mad fools who'll tell you he never existed at all.

One thing's for sure, all our childhoods would have been an awful lot duller if not for the inspiration he gave to Ray Harryhausen.

But Sinbad wasn't alone in enlivening our youthful lives.

So did Marvel Comics.

And so, when it happened, it seemed only appropriate that the worlds of Marvel and Harryhausen should at last be combined as Worlds Unknown #7 gave us an adaptation of Harryhausen's classic film The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

Here's what's going down in Sinbadland. Sinbad is sailing around when one of his men spots a small, flying creature and, for no good reason, tries to shoot it, causing it to drop the strange metal object it's been carrying.

Not bothering to ask any philosophical questions about the ethicality of shooting at things that are doing you no harm, and then stealing what they're  carrying, Sinbad soon finds himself in the city of Marabia where he slaps around the object's rightful owner and then finds himself being recruited by the local, golden-masked king, to help thwart an evil wizard called Koura who, as we all know, was played in the film by the legend that is Tom Baker.

Needless to say, for reasons I'm not totally clear about, this sets Sinbad and Koura on a sea-born race to reach an island and learn whatever its secret is.

But that's not before Koura brings the wooden figurehead of Sinbad's ship to life and gets it to steal our hero's charts.

It's at this point that issue #7 terminates and we learn that we're going to have to wait for issue #8 to find out how it all ends.

Obviously, we all know how it all ends, because we've all seen the movie.

In fact, we've seen it frequently. Mostly every bank holiday Monday, because it's on TV every bank holiday Monday and has been for about thirty five years.

Therein may lie the adaptation's Achilles heel.

Which is that we've all seen the movie and can therefore directly compare it to the comic.

And it's in this direct comparison that the fatal flaw in the concept of adapting a Ray Harryhausen movie is revealed.

That's that the central pleasure of any Harryhausen film dwells not within its plot and characters. It dwells within seeing rubber models come to life and fight people. Sadly, in a comic, that thrill's lost, as there are no rubber monsters in it, just drawings on a page; drawings of monsters and drawings of people. Hence there's no gap between the real and fantastical elements and the enchantment is lost.

There's also the problem that there's very little difference between a Sinbad tale and a Conan tale and, by this stage, Marvel had been doing Conan tales for years - but with the advantage that they weren't tied to a movie script and could therefore make the strip far more dynamic, in the mighty Marvel style, with a freedom that a faithful movie adaptation inevitably lacks.

It's written by Len Wein, and it's drawn by George Tuska and Vince Colletta and, while the art's not off-putting (Tuska makes things less cartoony than he sometimes does), nor is it particularly gripping. Restricted by the need for faithfulness, the thing does often feel as wooden as Sinbad's murderous figurehead.

In the end, it's not terrible, it's all competently done but it does feel rather by-the-numbers and thus lacks the atmosphere and magic of the movie.

But the main appeal for me lies in seeing Brian Clemens get a first-page credit.

As a producer and writer, Clemens was of course strongly involved in such treasures as The Avengers, The Persuaders, The Protectors and The Professionals, not to mention Adam Adamant Lives and the cinematic oddities that were And Soon The Darkness, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde and Captain Kronos. And if that isn't enough to make him deserve being immortalised in a comic, I don't know what would be.

Worlds Unknown #4 - Arena!

It's Saturday evening.

It may be 1969.

Before my very eyeballs, a new TV show's appeared.

It features a strange man in a ripped shirt.

It features another man, with the head of a dinosaur.

I know at once that this isn't Antiques Roadshow. Mostly because Antiques Roadshow hasn't been invented yet and, in my innocence, I have no reason to fear that it ever will be.

It turns out it's a new show, a show from a land far across the sea, where everything's bigger than it is over here. It's called Star Trek and it's the sort of thing anyone with any sense would want to see on their TV on a Saturday.

That episode was, of course, Arena, in which Captain Kirk's dumped on a planet by some all-powerful aliens to scrap it out with a ruffian to decide which of their two races deserves to live.

Kirk's outmatched in both the brute force and shirt-strength departments and his foe is cunning. But Kirk finally comes to realise he has one advantage.

He knows how to make a bamboo bazooka.

As I'm sure we all know, that episode wasn't an original tale. It was based on a story of the same name by Fredric Brown.

Except it seems it wasn't. Apparently, when it was written, the producers knew nothing of Brown's tale but, upon being informed of their own tale's resemblance to it, they promptly had the episode re-titled Arena and credited it as an adaptation of his story in order to make sure the lawyers wouldn't be calling.

Marvel, however, suffered from no such ignorance and so gave us their own straight adaptation of the tale in Worlds Unknown #4, later reprinted in Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes comic.

What happens is this. Bob Carson, an Earth astronaut, suddenly finds himself on a strange planet, having been teleported from his spaceship just as he was about to open fire on the craft of a pilot from a mysterious race known only as the Outsiders, with whom Earth's at war.

It turns out that an all-powerful being has put him and his foe on the planet, to fight it out.

After much scrapping and scheming and exposition, Carson finally achieves victory in his personal battle and instantly finds himself back on his ship - only to be told that the entire Outsider fleet has blown up for no noticeable reason.

Everyone else assumes it was down to a structural flaw in their ships but, alone of all the human race, Bob Carson knows what really happened.

It has to be said that Carson wins thanks to a plan that has to be the worst plan ever devised. It basically involves him knocking himself out and then hoping he'll recover his senses before the Outsider can tear him to pieces.

Luckily for him, it works but, given that the Outsider is only yards away when he knocks himself out, you have to say that, in the real world, it'd need a miracle for it to succeed.

Other than that, there's no bamboo bazooka, no tearing off of shirts and, most differently of all, upon achieving his victory, Carson doesn't give an impassioned speech at thin air about not killing a helpless foe, he just gets stuck into the task of killing him in the most basic manner possible.

On the plus side, there are a couple of lizards. One of which suffers a tragic fate, and another which reveals it has the power of speech. Regardless of the presence of a protagonist and an antagonist, the lizards are definitely the stars of the show.

"...from bamboo!"

As seen in the treatment of the first lizard, the tale's more sober than the Star Trek version but I must admit I do prefer the Star Trek one, simply because it features Captain Kirk and, no matter how melodramatic Kirk is as a character, he does have a certain vigour that helps to keep an episode bowling along energetically.

Star Trek also has that music. That music we all like to sing along to whenever there's a fight scene. No matter how hard it tries, no comic can ever hope to give us that.

Admittedly, I say that but I don't remember if that episode actually does use that music at any point.

But in my head it does. And that's good enough for me.

Worlds Unknown #2. A Gun For Dinosaur.

I don't need to take a sneak peak beneath my Christmas tree.

Why?

Because I already know what I'm getting for Christmas.

A time machine.

How do I know that? Because I've just come back in time and told myself.

Needless to say, I've now just killed my future self and stolen his time machine.

Arf, that's showed him who's boss.

But it's not all fun and games doing time travel, as we discover in issue #2 of Marvel's 1970s series Worlds Unknown.

In it, a couple of entrepreneurs are in the habit of taking clients back in time so they can bag the odd dinosaur and then take its head back to the present to impress their mates with.

Sadly, it all goes awry when, against their better judgement, they take two people with them who have lots of money but not much sense.

Inevitably, it all ends in disaster for the two clients, prompting the next prospective customer to decide not to take up his option of going.

It's a very odd story that wrong-foots you by not going in the direction you expect it to.

After all, thanks to Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder, we all expect such tales to end with the present having been irreparably altered by some wally standing on a butterfly in the distant past.

But not one butterfly gets trodden on in this tale - or is even seen. And any potential for time-line alteration is ignored as the story gives us a totally different moral. Which is that it takes a real man to tangle with dinosaurs, so don't try it unless you can handle a big gun.

While this is no doubt true, it's not a moral that's likely to make much impact on the lives of most of us.

But the tale does have the trump card that the two customers are so idiotic that you positively want them to get eaten by dinosaurs. And, as we all know, there are few things more pleasing in literature than seeing fools get their comeuppance.

And with that, merry Christmas. Don't forget to pull a cracker and don't forget to spurn the chance to tangle with a dinosaur.

Unless it's a very small dinosaur.

Like Barney.

Barney the Purple Dinosaur. How nice would his head look over my mantelpiece now I have my very own time machine?

Worlds Unknown #6 - Killdozer!

I do feel there can be no finer sight in the world than that of a homicidal bulldozer threatening to murder people for daring to defy it.

Let's be honest, we all like our construction equipment to have a bit of attitude.

And that can only mean one thing.

Killdozer!

I first learnt of that mighty machine's existence when watching a TV movie about it, sometime in the mid-1970s but my other encounter with it was in the pages of Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes comic, where it featured as a back-up tale.

How I thrilled as it massacred man after man after man.

But, looking at it again, for the first time in roughly forty years, will it still hold the same charm for me?

It starts with a scene familiar to all James Cameron fans; a world where human beings are at war with killer machines possessed by an evil consciousness. Unlike the Terminator franchise, this war is in the distant past and, unlike the Terminator franchise, the human race develops a defence against the machines. A defence which gives us total victory.

But that's not before one evil bit of consciousness escapes and survives, on an island, within the structure of a temple, for untold ages.

Sadly, when a team of workmen set out to demolish the temple, in order to start work on an airstrip, the evil consciousness takes over their bulldozer and starts to kill everyone off.

It's not just a tale of serial murder, it's also a tale of distrust; as the moment one man is killed, the workmen quickly turn against each other, blaming everyone except the obvious culprit.

What strikes me about this tale now is how angry everyone is. You do get the feeling that if they themselves could take possession of bulldozers, our cast of characters would all be going on a bit of a homicidal rampage themselves.

To be honest, the bulldozer doesn't have any great personality - it's not like it has any means to express itself, apart from by killing people - and it doesn't seem to have a plan beyond killing people. So, the tale's not some sort of classic but it's harmlessly diverting and it's nicely drawn by Dick Ayers, with an uncredited but fairly obvious helping hand from John Romita.

Of course, that's the comic. I don't have a clue how the TV movie stands up after all this time. It is, however, up there with Snowbeast as one of the few TV movies that's lodged in my memory from my childhood, so it must have done something right.

Worlds Unknown #3 - Farewell to the Master!

Earthlings, I can only ask that you feel a great sense of joy for me. For, only the other night, I had the chance to finally see the Keanu Reeves version of The Day The Earth Stood Still.

The power!

The thrills!

The awe!

None of  those were present as the thing struggled to hold my attention and made me feel like I was watching a sci-fi version of Meet Joe Black with all the interesting bits removed.

This of course was a terrible disappointment to me, as the 1950s version of the movie's one of my favourite sci-fi flicks of all time.

But, of course, none of this matters because we all know there was an even more important adaptation of Farewell to the Master than even those two.

And that was Worlds Unknown's version of the tale, as produced by Roy Thomas, Ross Andru and Wayne Howard. As with Marvel's adaptation of He That Hath Wings, I first encountered it in the pages of Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes comic.

 The first thing that strikes me is how much resemblance the first part of it bears to the Dr Who episode Army of Ghosts. In both cases, a mysterious sphere's appeared from nowhere and the authorities have been unable to even put a dent in it. Until, now the fateful moment's arrived, it opens, to reveal the aliens within. Is this similarity coincidence or was Russell T Davies influenced by the earlier tale?

The second thing that strikes me is that Gort isn't called Gort. He's called Gnut. As, "Gnut," looks suspiciously like a near anagram of a very rude word, I must confess I can't help feeling Gort was a better choice of name.

The third thing that strikes me is that, unlike the 1950s movie, it's not the military who're responsible for shooting Klaatu but a lone nutjob up a tree. Indeed, the military in this version seem a model of restraint and professionalism compared to the trigger happy fools of the 1950s movie.

This leads to a very different tale in which Klaatu's buried with honours and a pair of reporters are determined to spend a night in the museum in which Gnut is now housed, to see what he gets up to when there's no one around.

It turns out he uses audio recordings of animals and people in order to temporarily bring them back to life.

All of this culminates in him restoring Klaatu to health before he departs with the words, "It is I who am the master," ringing in the reporters' ears.

It's a much smaller scale tale than the one we're used to from the movie. It's also less dramatic. The action takes place almost exclusively in the museum in the course of one evening, there's little sense of threat and there's no message from Klaatu about mankind mending its violent ways or else.

In this sense, they're very different tales, using the same basic ideas to tell completely different stories. I've never read the Harry Bates original, so can't comment on how true to it this adaptation is but, as it's written by Roy Thomas, I suspect it's probably extremely faithful.

So, which do I prefer? The 1950s movie version or the 1970s comic book one?

I must admit, I do prefer the movie version. I can't help feeling it's far more potent and memorable because of the greater sense of menace engendered by Gort, the race against time, the manhunt for Klaatu and the big final speech. The pacifist message of the movie may be somewhat garbled by its order that peace be maintained by the threat of total annihilation from a police state but it does give the film a sense of drama, urgency and purpose that this version ultimately and deliberately lacks.

He That Hath Wings - Worlds Unknown #1 or Planet of the Apes #Something-Or-Other.

As we all know, the greatest claim to immortality Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes comic possessed was not that it had stories in it about talking apes. After all, once you've seen one ape talk, you've seen them all talk.

No.

It was the fact that the rest of its pages featured tales of sci-fi, mystery and wonder. How we thrilled to the adventures of Don McGregor's Black Panther, Barry Smith's Ka-Zar and Thomas and Kane's Warlock.

But, beyond even this splendour, the real jewels to be found in the comic were the one-off tales that found their way into the mag's pages.

Of those tales, two have always lodged in my memory more than all others.

And that can only mean one thing.

That it's time to take a look at one of them.

He That Hath Wings is an adaptation of a 1934 short story by a curiously uncredited Edmond Hamilton. In it, thanks to a freak electrical accident, a boy (David) is born with the ability to fly.

Fearing for the child's welfare in a world that'll pry incessantly into his life, his doctor takes him to an isolated island to raise him in private.

But, when the doctor dies, David sets off to explore the world and, after being accidentally shot by a groundsman, marries the daughter of the groundsman's employer.

Well, that could all have been a lovely happy little ending.

There's only one problem.

His new wife's a complete and total dolt.

And so, instead of reacting as any sane woman would to being married to a man who can fly, she nags him to have his wings cut off so he can be just like everyone else and get a nine-to-five job.

Now, I don't like to criticise a man's taste in women but could it have been humanly possible for him to have found a more doltish and clod-brained woman if he'd tried?

I mean, what kind of woman wouldn't want a husband who could fly? It's humanity's greatest dream come true. She could have been the envy of all her friends - and cadged lifts off him when she didn't have the bus fare.

Happily, after a while, his wings start to grow back.

Not so happily, so hen-pecked is he that he decides to have them cut off again.

But then, on the way to the surgery, he decides to have one last flight for old times' sake and, ultimately, his new wings exhausted by the flight, he plunges into the sea and to his death.

Is he downhearted about this?

No.

He's happy because it means he's managed to die free, rather than as a prisoner of convention.

I must confess that, as a child, this finale all seemed rather touching and beautiful to me.

But how does the tale strike me upon re-reading it as an adult?

To be honest, it's all quite annoying. His wife really does seem a complete and total dunderhead. I'll say it again. The power of flight. It's humanity's greatest ever dream! What is up with the woman?

And, obviously, some might spot a certain implied misogyny in a tale about a woman who's so narrow-minded and conformist that she literally clips her husband's wings.

Not only that but our hero's ultimate decision to die flying rather than live Earthbound does make him seem like a total wimp. When all's said and done, there's nothing to stop him from insisting on keeping his new wings and doing with his life whatever he wants.

But the great appeal of the tale was always Gil Kane's art and, while the story itself might not hold the appeal for me it once did, his art looks as splendid as ever. I do always feel his stylised technique was best suited to science-fiction and fantasy rather than super-hero work and this is one of the tales that proves it.

Of course, as a child, it was a strange feeling reading it, as it was impossible not to see parallels with the X-Men's Warren Worthington and it's tempting to see this as an Alternate Universe exploration of how Worthington's life would have been had he been totally devoid of a backbone.

But what oh what could be that other memorable tale I referred to earlier in the post?

Call me psychic but I have a sneaky feeling we might be finding out in a day or two's time.

But, Reader, can YOU guess which tale it might be?

The unforgettable tales of Worlds Unknown.

Watching the Eurovision Song Contest at the weekend reminded us all that "abroad" is a whole other world. How we thrilled to Romanian falsetto vampires, Greeks demanding free booze, a man singing a love song to his shoes, and, erm, Bonnie Tyler.

But there are other worlds; worlds even stranger than those that lie within the boundaries of the European Broadcasting Union.

And so it was that, in the 1970s, Marvel Comics gave us Worlds Unknown.

Anyone who read Marvel UK's Planet of the Apes mag will remember Worlds Unknown with fondness - or at least the tales it contained...

The cover story might be about the coming of the Martians but we all know the true stand-out of this issue is Gil Kane's He That Hath Wings, in which a youth discovers that being born with feathers might not be the blessing one might expect it to be.

It's A Gun For Dinosaur.

It's so long since I read his that I can't remember the ending. I'm sort of assuming it's one of those going-back-in-time-and-killing-your-grandfather-type twists.

That reminds me. I must go back in time and kill my grandfather before he fulfills his pledge to travel forward in time and kill me.

That'll teach him.

It's Farewell to the Master.

Roy Thomas and Ross Andru's adaptation might be more faithful to the original but I still prefer The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Ah, all those memories of William Shatner ripping his shirt off and building a cannon from a big stick of bamboo come flooding back as we get Marvel's adaptation of Fredric Brown's Arena.

I always loved this one, as an alien big cat climbs aboard a spaceship and, one by one, polishes off the crew until it has an unhappy ending.

I can't help feeling that having the homicidal bulldozer ranting like Dr Doom on the cover probably doesn't add a lot of dignity to proceedings.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was one of my favourite childhood films. It had Sinbad! It had a six-armed sword fight! It had Tom Baker! Verily, the late Ray Harryhausen didst know how to keep a child happy.

Sadly, I don't remember being so taken with George Tuska and Vince Colletta's adaptation.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad comes to an end, as we get that sword fight.

And Worlds Unknown also comes to an end.

Its run may have been short but it was certainly sweet - and where would Planet of the Apes readers have been without the tales the UK mag so happily reprinted from it?