Category: Sapphire & Steel
Last article published: 4 January 2015
This is the 38th post under this label
The Sapphire & Steel Big Finish audios are out of print, I think - and very pricey elsewhere - so if I'm going to offer up a bonus chapter under this tag, I'm going to have to look elsewhere. Thankfully, Sapphire & Steel HAVE appeared in comics form!
IN THIS ONE... A beast man from a mirror dimension plagues an artist and his son.
REVIEW: Look-In was a comics magazine published by ITV to tie into the various series they broadcast. The weekly serialized British series like Sapphire & Steel and Benny Hill, but also American imports like Chips! Angus Allan and Arthur Ranson did every S&S strip. Allan was a veteran of TV tie-in strips from the similar TV Century 21 and wrote practically every strip in Look-In. Ranson's photo-referenced style was also used on various TV tie-ins and looks quite good, even if you can tell when he's using photo reference. He tells the story that Joanna Lumley once offered to pose for pictures for him, but he was out that day and the powers that be told her it wasn't necessary. I would be miffed too. Still, his style, consistent throughout the series, mixes excellent illustration with subdued water colors. It's not hard to imagine this on television, but he doesn't shy away from giving it flourishes only possible in comics, whether oddly-shaped panels (there's one of Sapphire's face inside a clock, for example) or intriguing ideas about flow from panel to panel (Sapphire mentally peering through time and seeming to become an early Celt).
In terms of writing, Allan understands the types of stories Sapphire & Steel are meant to tell even if the strip is running concurrently with the show's first series. The Beast in the Picture is a science-fictional "haunting" in which a creature escapes from a painting of itself, something it was "whispering" to the artist from another dimension. At one point Steel is sucked into a different painting and almost gets guillotined during the French Revolution, though mirrors are the main accessway to that other plane and where the Beast imprisons people as it grows in power. It's a bit slapdash and irreconcilable, but so was the show, in that exact way.
Where the story fails for me is in the plotting, not the premise. For example, Steel is pulled from the guillotine by Sapphire simply turning back time. Anti-climactic. I understand how Sapphire lures the Beast into the mirror, but not how they all escape to break his access. It's a little like, oops, running out of space, gotta go, resolved okay? They had something interesting in the idea of a world beyond the paintings (and paintings all over the house), so I wish they'd used that to the end instead of the mirror stuff. Would have been more coherent, but also perhaps more interesting than Sapphire pulling a Zatanna (I am of course well-trained to read backward speech thanks to other comics).
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE VORTEX: This is where I spot references to Doctor Who, S&S's spiritual cousin. In this case, I was certainly reminded of Warriors' Gate, which also features a world beyond the mirror, and the animal-like people who lived there. However, that's a Doctor Who serial two years in this strip's future! Who's copying who?!
REREADABILITY: Medium-Low - I like the look, and they've got the premise down, I just needed it to be sharper.
Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. Let's keep this going on Monday until we've gone through all the ones I've managed to find.
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