reports of unusual phenomena in abandoned coal mines near Wyoming Valley, Anthony Rogers ends up in a cavein that keeps him suspended in sleep for over four hundred years and when he wakes, he finds himself in a world of strange creatures and exciting new technologies.
Dille will keep science fiction fans entertained with these enjoyably cheesy and suspenseful adventures as each comic in this grand collection expands his colourful realm.
Will Buck be able to adapt to his new surroundings in time to survive I read this book inas a teenager, and enjoyed it very much then.
This review is only for the sequence "Martians Invade Jupiter" that is a finalist for the Retro Hugo Award.
I give this particular storystars,
A little disclaimer: this book does not include the entire "Martians Invade Jupiter" story.
I estimate it contains about half of the story, ending sometime in, But there is more than enough to get the gist, This is a very thinly disguised account of the U, S. versus the Axis Powers in World War, Buck Rogers goes on various combat missions to fight Martians who are standins for the Japanese.
The Martians are drawn in a very racist manner, with racist language used by Buck and his allies to describe them and broken English is spoken by the Martians.
There are all kinds of patriotic messages interwoven into the narrative, It's interesting that when Buck uses tricks and decoys to defeat the enemy, he is lauded, but when the Martians do the same thing they are called cowards.
At one point, Buck's girlfriend Wilma Deering
accidentally get her molecules rearranged so that she gains weight.
The strip makes much of her fatness, when she is shown to be only slightly more plump than usual.
But she essentially goes crazy, thinking that Buck cannot love her anymore, and goes out on a solo, presumably suicide, mission.
The bottom line is that what appealed to primarily youngsters of thes is now seen as racist and chauvinistic.
The artwork is fairly crude, especially by today's standards, with lots of unnecessary verbiage, Still, hypothetical Hugo voters inwould probably have enjoyed Buck Rogers a great deal and would likely have nominated it.
I've never written this about a book before, but the editing of this book could have been much better.
I am a scifi fan, though, and this interested me as representative of scifi storytelling of its era.
To the point of poor editing choices, the selections from the comic strip are presented out of sequence, alternating stories from thes and thes.
To add to the confusion, there is never an explanation for "what has gone on before" which would have provided helpful context for several of the stories, and perhaps make a more enjoyable reading experience.
One story has an important plot point being that some mysterious entity has changed the Earth's axis of rotation, but when Buck Rogers comes across the device used to do this it is seemingly unrelated to the ongoing storyline at that point.
It may be related, but how is a reader new to Buck Rogers to know
Other elements are equally frustrating.
One item is a list of important characters appearing throughout the strip's existence, but some of these do not even appear the stories included in the book.
There are some slapdash essays from the sons of the creators which are less informative than they are selfpromotional.
The next to last item in the book is a proposed reformed alphabet, numbering system, and calendar that make little sense and has no apparent relationship to the Buck Rogers strip other than be an invention of the The collected works of Buck Rogers in the 25th century's editor.
Despite the silliness of the usually notveryscientific science fiction with its notable variety of rays sleep rays, heat rays, disintegration rays, cyonic rays.
. . whatever cyonic rays are, among others and the seemingly random sometimes nonsensical plotting, the action is nonstop and the art is sometimes good.
Buck Rogers does have the honor being one of the early science fiction works I've read to have a device reminiscent of a cell phone.
In this instance, it is the rarely used but often useful radiophone, Buck Rogers was the first great hero of the spaceways, premiering in Amazing Stories inand becoming a comic strip icon a year later.
He was the subject of film, novels, comic books and had his own television series, It used to be that anyone who went to a science fiction film or read a science fiction book was liable to be teased for liking "That Buck Rogers stuff.
" This big book is a collection of some of the best of his sequential art appearances in the newspapers of the's 's, representative of Nowlan amp Calkins' best known brainchild.
There are a lot of differences between newspapers then and now does anyone now even see a newspaper, primarily that the old ones were much, much larger, and there was room for detailed action drawings and great big word balloons filled with description and dialog.
One of the modern improvements is that the old stories sometimes accurately reflected the racist and sexist attitudes of the time.
Personally, I always preferred Flash amp Dale to Buck amp Wilma, but I can't dispute his historical influence and importance.
This book includes a nice introduction by Ray Bradbury from, and a delightful Buck autobiography by Nowlan and Calkins from.
Without Buck and Flash, there never would have been Captain Kirk or Luke Skywalker, My folks gave me this as a birthday present in the earlys, and it's been a treasured possession ever since.
Originally published in, this immense volume is an historical artifact in itself, and the first introduction many of us had to the character.
The art is showcased well, and the earlystrips are presented in their entirety, I always preferred Calkins' and Nowlan's story to Flash Gordon, with more relatable storylines and less distracting artwork.
Where the volume falls down is in the later strips, The editor felt the need to touch on various arcs over the course of decades, so chapters sometimes begin after an adventure has begun, and frequently end with the storyline unresolved, which is very distressing!
Additionally, the vociferous racism primarily towards Asians is very difficult to take, and the sexist characterisation of Wilma Deering who starts off competent if a bit emotionally flighty but who turns into a complete ninny in later years has not aged well at all.
Had The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in theth Century been anything near complete, this would be a fivestar gem of a book.
Considered longitudinally, the Buck Rogers serial itself is a treasure trove, a daily newspaper adventure strip in the style of the Perils of Pauline, its eponymous protagonist constantly leaping from frying pan to fire.
While the work skewed in later years toward the juvenile especially the Sunday color spreads, over its more thanyear run the strip represents an attempt to imagine a worldyears in the future while struggling to keep pace with the proteanth Century.
In the forgotten pages of this classic work, readers will find echoes of the Stock Market collapse, the Great Depression fantasies about goldhoarding Atlantis dwellers, World War II with Nazis as ruthless, brutal tigermen of Mars who first threaten war and ultimately commence invasions of EarthEurope and later JupiterRussia Imperial Japan as suicidally treacherous monkeymen from Planet X, their environs littered with eraappropriate "Kilroy was Here" graffiti, and a preSALT Cold War nuclear era lots of espionage and madscientific atomic tinkering, to say nothing of the Space Race and whatever equivalents its artist might have had to salute the first humans to walk on the face of the moon.
Unfortunately, this particular compendium offers up only a small portion of the first half of Buck Rogers' reign, and proceeds to deliver it as a collation error, leaving off days, months, and in some cases whole years of content, the entirety out of chronological order.
This was sufficiently irksome that I went and compared Wikipedia's sitelinkchronological listing of published strips with this The collected works of Buck Rogers in the 25th century's table of contents, so I can state precisely that the book I'm reviewing includes only D, D, D, D, and scattered strips taken from D, D, and Sin no discernable order.
In other words, after leading off with a breathless introduction byRay Bradbury, my hard copy intersperses strips fromwith disorganized chunks of varying lengths from,,, and.
It's disorienting to say the least, Fortunately, sitelinkit turns out there's a far better way to introduce yourself to the world of Buck Rogers online click to find the first five years of strips, and I'm here to tell you that it's absolutely worth reading.
First entering print at the height of the flapper era, the serial chips away at its inherent chauvinism by introducing timetraveler Rogers and Wilma Deering and their traitorous foils Killer Kane and Ardala as equals.
Rogers emerges in a postapocalyptic world that very much anticipates Planet of the Apes, only with Mongols in the place of simian overlords.
It's Orientalist, but if you hang in there long enough, you'll find the racism tempered to mere exoticism upon the revelation that the Mongol Empire is in fact heavily factionalized, the despotic antagonists acting independently of and in opposition to the central ruler and other Mongol subgroups a narrative sophistication that generates opportunities galore for nearconstant crosses, doublecrosses, and orthogonal plot twists.
Despite hilarious anachronisms chiefly, the biplanes and zeppelins of its earliest strips, to say nothing of the slangy dialogue and the aforementioned "Kilroy" graffiti to be found in strips of the mid to late 's, the Buck Rogers serial pretty quickly evolves beyond Earth's confines and dimensions into the requisite rockets and raybeams of contemporary science fantasy adventure.
Considering the strip's longevity and the reallife technological advances with which the strip coincided, it should come as no surprise that its authors frequently proved prophetic, as with this sitelinkdepiction of the modernday drone: Click the link to view the original.
Of course, the work affords fanciful inventions aplenty, but the strip is selfconsciously grounded more in science fiction than in fantasy, taking care to call its readers' attention to easily overlooked consequences of basic physics and biology: recoil energy expenditures necessary to achieving escape velocity variations in atmospheric pressure encountered relative to sea level and overall mass on Earth, other bodies in the solar system, and in the vacuum of space changes in an ecosystem arising from abandoning farming in favor of synthetic food production sociological impacts of doubling and trebling human lifespans via imprisonment in selfsufficient hyperhygienic bubbles, etc.
Perhaps the most shocking example of a scienceinfluenced plot element occurs in Rogers' very first space adventure, "Tiger Men of Mars," a storyline fromthat also required its characters to accustom themselves to the weightlessness of freefall.
As a lastditch attempt to bring about Mars' downfall, Rogers' team quite literally retards the orbital speed of one of its satellites.
The sitelinkresulting environmental cataclysm is graphically and somewhat accurately depicted as obliterating the entire biosphere of the planet.
Our solution is genocidally extreme, but hey kids, with a little application of scientific ingenuity, just look what you can accomplish! Click the link to view the original.
Dubious ethics aside, there's every reason for Goodreaders to rush straightaway to sample the tremendous Rogers resource to be found online.
And for those more skeptical among you who prefer lingering over my loving words, I think I can seal the deal with a last pair of images.
sitelinkLook at this early cover illustration of sitelink Arthur C, Clarke's brilliant sitelink Rendezvous with Rama, a story of human first contact/exploration of "the other," in the form of an enormous, interstellar, cylindrical bioship.
Now look at sitelinkthis Buck Rogers strip, which precedes it by more thanyears.
Click the link to see the original,
Get thee hence, There are better worlds than this, .