I’m a fan of Gold Key’s old MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER series by Russ Manning; as Dark Horse’s third TPB of reprints is out of my price range I recently tried finding it by interlibrary loan. What I got, instead, was MAGNUS, ROBOT FIGHTER: Flesh and Steel, collecting part of Dynamite’s 2014 revival by Fred Van Lente and Cory Smith.
Magnus starts out living in an idyllic Pacific Northwest community only to wake up and discover he’s been trapped in the Matrix, more or less. Trying to make sense of this, he enters civilization, winds up fighting robots and instead of becoming a hero becomes the target of an angry society with Leeja, his girlfriend in the original, the bounty hunter out to take him down.
The rationale behind all this is good but it’s so different from the original it qualifies as a Name Only reboot. That’s the burden of intellectual property in comics — nobody wants to let it lie fallow for long. But is there that much nostalgia for the character? Or given an earlier reboot from Valiant ran close to a hundred issues in the 1990s, maybe it’s not nostalgia but fondness for that relatively recent versions.
Whatever the reasons, it didn’t work for me. However I will give the creators a point for showing Magnus’ original fantasy world as multi-racial; too many fantasy settings like that default to a 1950s white suburban look.
AUTUMNLANDS: Tooth and Claw by Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Dewey feels very much like a reworking of Jack Kirby’s Kamandi, but a much better take than the Magnus reboot was. As in Kamandi’s “Earth After Disaster” it’s a world of talking animals but here they also practice magic. Magic that, as we learn in the first issue, is slowly dying away. A desperate attempt to reverse that brings The Great One, the founder of civilization, from the distant past — but instead of a wise sorcerer, it’s a butt-kicking pink-skinned almost hairless creature. Learoyd, the time traveler, is equally horrified to find himself in such a freaky future. Equally upsetting, the dominant civilization, dwelling in its flying cities, has been exploiting the ground-dwellers for a long time. Now it’s time for payback … an enjoyable read.
Art by Manning, Kirby and Dewey (top to bottom), all rights to images remain with current holders.
