Space 1999 #50: Moonless Night

Category: Space 1999
Last article published: 8 February 2021
This is the 52nd post under this label

Space 1999 #1 (November 1975, but on the stands in August, a couple weeks before the show actually premiered) by Nicola Cuti and Joe Staton

CHARLTON... ON THE MOON!? I reviewed every episode of Space 1999 in 2015, but hadn't thought about doing any of the spin-off media. After all, my nostalgia for the show proved to go only so far. 1999 had a strong premise, even if it was a little wacky, but many of the episodes dipped into science fantasy and bad writing, especially the further it went. The weird soft reboot of the second season didn't help matters despite the addition of its breakout character, Maya. But I recently came into the possession of Charlton's Space 1999 comics from the era (most of them drawn by a young John Byrne) and the black and white magazine published parallel to it (I didn't even KNOW Charlton published magazines!) with, allegedly, more mature content. I don't know how true that is, but the art is often gorgeous, making liberal use of Gray Morrow. While I let Sapphire & Steel's comic strip take over Mondays for a few months, I won't let Space 1999 do the same this summer. Let's put a pin in it and maybe return to the idea later.

REVIEW: Seeing as the comic (and the first issue of the magazine too) was apparently on the stands before the show premiered, it starts with a short recap of the events of September 13th, 1999, giving away the bare bones of plot of the first episode in the process. Well, doesn't much matter now. In a way, it makes the comics stand alone and decades later, that might not be a bad thing. "Moonless Night" is this recap, and the main story is more properly called "Intelligent Species". It has the crew of Moonbase Alpha find a planet they call "The Pearl", which might hopefully serve as a new home for the 300+ humans lost in space. On the planet surface, Koenig, Helena, Victor and Carter (a tiny Paul is also seen on a screen) find the remnants of an abandoned civilization and primitive humanoids rooting about. Oh, and giant slugs!

Comics are a good place to do the stories that would break the special effects budget of a TV show, but the danger is to turn the franchise into a monster of the month series, which has the overall effect of dumbing down the property. Not that Space 1999 would need the help, going forward. But as it turns out, the slugs are actually the intelligent species of the planet, now living underground since their planet went to seed. It's rather obvious because Koenig makes way too many assumptions about humanoids being intelligent, and non-humanoids therefore being monsters or beasts of burden, even as the evidence has the slugs crawling around a city and the humanoids being servile. And ultimately, they aren't malicious either, offering the Alphans a chance at a new home, if only they'll take it. Well, the weird thing is, these telepathic creatures are each a composite of thousands of minds having chosen to live as a "colony" of sorts inside these massive bodies, and do the Alphans want a slug body to survive in the same way? Well, no, of course not. And hey, don't feel bad about the slugs you killed - even though they represent thousands of beings each! - because those were criminals exiled to the planet surface. Eep!

We certainly can't fault Nicola Cuti's imagination, though I might cut the final revelation that these beings used to be humanoid, confirming Koenig's bias tha humanoids are the basic design for intelligent life in the universe. It's an odd coda to a story about not judging a book by its cover (which in and of itself, is old hat SF). I can fault Cuti's internal logic, however. The Pearl is at first visited because it's a world of forests and rivers, but then it turns out it's a rocky desert with a few mangled trees. At first, I thought the fault was with Joe Staton (Cuti's partner on E-Man), but no, it's later stated as the reason why the slugs now live underground. Staton isn't really one for likenesses despite that very well-executed cover, though Helena and Victor's hairstyles are recognizable and there are shades of Landau in Koenig's profile. I wonder if his choice to often cut people faces by panel borders was to hide the lack of likeness in close-ups, or because there's SO MUCH DIALOG on each page.

I'm not saying that's not how the show feels at times, though. I mean the dialog, not the weird camera framing. Staton will only be with the series one more issue, Cuti for the next four and a lot of magazine stories.

BONUS MATERIAL: The issue includes a prose short (very short) story by Cuti, with illustrations by Tom Sutton, entitled "The Kammerer Effect". Its slim tale about an alien gliding monkey has nothing to do with Space 1999.

READABILITY: Medium - Adventure, spectacle, science-fiction, they're all here. Even if the story isn't perfect (and I would rather see something happen on Alpha itself), I really thought it would be sillier. After all, this came out in the same era as Gold Key's Star Trek comics and some of those are real doozies even if they're built on more solid ground.