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« on: 15 December, 2020, 10:50:46 AM »
See how I put that triple-digit numbering in the subject header? That's because I very very much hope this series of reprint volumes is so successful for the Hibernia team (and the Treasury team at Rebellion) that we get at least a hundred of them.
The Angry Planet is not a series I've paid much attention to in the past. I wasnt a Tornado reader- and picked up my set of them via Ebay many years later. When I did, I confess to being mostly unimpressed, and still to this day I wonder why it got merged with the prog and Scream didn't. A 2000AD & Scream merger would have been almost too exciting for words back then- the wedding of 2000AD and Tornado seemed like a kick to the prog's balls, causing it to briefly stumble on its passage to greatness.
That said, perhaps a lot of my reticence to enjoy Tornado was due to the awful printing- which oddly never bothered me, and still doesn't, when looking through my early back progs.
Because here, The Angry Planet positively shines.
I mentioned the high standard of printing elsewhere, but it's worth repeating: this is the best the strip has ever looked. It's up there with an imagined luxurious Titan version. The black lines are crisp, the paper is pure white and only on a single spread of two pages did I feel the quality slipped a teeny bit. But that may well have been an error in my copy, and the fact that it slightly stuck out is only a further indication of how good the rest of the book is. And, I really need to restate this- the rest of the book is so very good indeed.
As far as the strip itself goes, I was genuinely shocked. I won't comment on the ending, or the lead-up to it, because I think outside forces nudged the story in directions it should maybe not have gone, and maybe it was forced to end abruptly when the original idea may have benefited from more room to breathe.
But the set up, and first two thirds are sublime. Bellardinelli's art is full of mad vistas and insane giant machines. Yes, he blatantly steals from Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica along the way, but who cares? This is British weekly comics of the 1970s, where would they be without swipes? His wide shot of the strip's Valles Marineris stand-in, "the canyon of lost souls", is so gorgeous it seems odd to think it appeared in the pages of a disposable 10p comic. These things would be held in such a higher regard if adults had actually bothered to open them back in the day.
Hebden's story resonates strongly, in those early chapters, to an audience familiar with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (begun in 1992)- and there is a 'hard sf' tone to the strip that had me double checking the dates of various classics of the genre to work out who was influenced by who. For a late seventies Mars story, this is refreshingly uninspired by Bradbury and the more fantastical Martian stories. At least, until near the end, when it gets a bit Beneath The Planet of the Apes, and I started to imagine an early eighties movie version starring Doug McClure at Matt Markham.
But at its heart, Angry Planet is a nicely political, hard sf story of frontier colonists fighting a dictatorial and corrupt organisation. The fantasy elements that come in later seem shoehorned in and ultimately unsatisfying, cheapening what could have been a much wider and more long-running story. There's one very seventies bit of racism that would have been unremarkable at the time, but nowadays thankfully sticks out a mile.
And that, dear friends, is what I made of The Angry Planet. More pertinently, what I made of the Hibernia book version- which I very much hope is the start of a long series. The volume is beautiful, the design work is second to none (though I'd have used that panel of the canyon of lost souls on the cover, not a monster, but what do I know?) and I cant wait for the next release.
Thanks guys, it's much appreciated.
SBT
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