Back in the early months of 1973, Marvel Comics confidently made a big push into the black-and-white comics magazine market then dominated by Warren Publishing with a slate of four horror titles — Dracula Lives, Monsters Unleashed, Tales of the Zombie, and Vampire Tales — obviously designed to go head-to-head with Warren’s trio of Creepy, Eerie, and Vampirella.  Within two-and-a-half years, however, all four of those books had shuffled off back to the graveyard, victims of a general downturn in the horror genre’s appeal to American comics fans that had also prompted a significant pruning of Marvel’s color comics of that ilk.  (TTFN, Man-Thing; catch ya later, Morbius; Living Mummy, we hardly knew ye.)

Still, if you’d taken a look at the magazine racks in October, 1975, Marvel’s confidence in its ability to compete in the B&W comics field — or, at least, its determination to do so — would hardly have seemed to have diminished since the heady days of the “Marvel Monster Group”.  That month, you might have scored copies of Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #18, Planet of the Apes #15, Savage Sword of Conan #9… maybe even Crazy #15 or Doc Savage #2 (which had both come out in August, but wouldn’t be bumped off the stands by new issues until December).  And also, of course, the book that’s the main topic of today’s post:  the fourth issue of Marvel Preview. 

As a title, Marvel Preview was at one and the same time both hard and easy to categorize; while it would never settle into a single specific genre like the rest of its peers, it was also clearly nothing more or less than the black-and-white magazine version of a tryout title — the equivalent of such color comics as Marvel Feature, Marvel Spotlight, Marvel Premiere, and Marvel Presents.  (Not to mention DC Comics’ Showcase, which had pioneered the format back in 1956, or the same publisher’s then-current variation on the same concept, 1st Issue Special.).  Launching in February, 1975, the new magazine started things off with “Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars” — an umbrella title that covered a couple of comics stories inspired by the “ancient astronaut” theories popularized by Erich von Däniken, as well as several text features on the same subject.  Issue #2 followed in April, cover-featuring the Punisher in his solo debut, with Len Wein and Howard Chaykin’s “Dominc Fortune” serving as a backup.  The third issue, arriving in July, devoted virtually all its page count to a full-length adventure of Blade, the Vampire Slayer.

For the record, the only one of the three my younger self bought off the stands was #2 (perhaps for the Chaykin story, as I wasn’t really all that into the Punisher).  But I was there for #4, probably because a flip through its contents let me know that the lead story had been written by Steve Englehart, and by this point, he was a creator I would follow from project to project; of course, I might not have picked up the magazine in the first place if its colorful cover, painted by Gray Morrow (who’d done the same for the previous two issues) hadn’t caught my eye.

Equally as attractive as Morrow’s cover was the inside cover frontispiece, illustrated by an artist who was doing most of his comics work at Warren these days, but still did the odd job for Marvel and DC here and there: Bernie Wrightson:

Before we’d even gotten past the magazine’s table of contents page, we’d already had two pictorial representations of this issue’s star attraction, Star-Lord* — and we still had no idea who the guy was, other than that he could apparently fly unaided in outer space (and that his pistol wasn’t just for show).  We’d get a little more information (though not much, honestly) via the editorial by Archie Goodwin that immediately followed the TOC:

Recently returned to Marvel Comics in an editorial capacity following an earlier stint writing for the publisher as a freelancer, Archie Goodwin had even more recently taken over the responsibility for Marvel’s entire slate of black-and-white magazines — a move that, in a sense, brought his professional comics career back around to where he’d started in the mid-1960s, when he’d been the editor for Warren’s then-fledgling B&W line.  As he lays out in no uncertain terms in this piece (which, per the Grand Comics Database, was illustrated by John Fuller and Rick Bryant), Goodwin grew up a fan of the kind of science fiction material produced by EC Comics in that company’s heyday, “with their anti-heroes and downbeat endings”, rather than of the “Western, detective, or pirate yarns done up in space suits and rocket ships” pejoratively labeled “Space Opera“.  But, as he goes on to explain, he’s now been charged with following through on projects begun by Marv Wolfman prior to the latter’s move to become editor-in-chief of Marvel’s color comics; and one of those projects (tentatively named “STARLORD” by Wolfman), involves “emphasizing the adventure aspects of s-f and having series characters”.  Luckily for Goodwin, he’s recently been turned on by a friend to some alleged space opera — specifically, Jack Vance’s 1964 novel The Star King — that he actually enjoyed, and can even respect… so maybe this job won’t be so excruciating, after all.

Intriguingly — and also somewhat ironically — Goodwin’s editorial echoes one written some fourteen months earlier for the first issue of Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, in which Roy Thomas had written disparagingly of space opera in contrast to the more “serious” sort of SF he planned to feature in that B&W comics magazine — as well as a shorter editorial note in the second issue, in which, having received a considerable amount of criticism over the previous piece, Thomas walked his earlier points back a bit.  As we discussed a couple of months back, the noble experiment (or self-indulgent folly — take your pick) that was UWoSF had shipped its sixth and last regular issue in August, 1975… so the arrival of Marvel Preview #4 just two months later, even though it had likely already been in the works, might seem to suggest that that disreputable ol’ space opera stuff had in the end carried the day against more highfalutin’ literary SF fare.  (As might Roy Thomas’ forthcoming quest to secure the Star Wars comic-book license for Marvel, though that’s a story for another day.)

Anyway, aside from all that contextual business, what did Goodwin’s piece tell us about Star-Lord?  Well, besides that Marv Wolfman’s germ of an idea had been brought to fruition by writer Steve Englehart and artist Steve Gan “with some extra assistance from Bob McLeod”, not a whole lot.  For more specifics about Marvel’s new space-opera hero, we’d have to turn the page to yet another text piece, this one by Englehart himself — the title of which cheekily references the origin story of a certain famous character belonging to Marvel’s chief competitor (though one for whom Englehart had already scripted one story, and would write more in the future):

Having read all of Englehart’s work on “Doctor Strange” to date, it was hardly news to me that he had a more than casual interest in metaphysics.  Even at the age of eighteen, however, I was less inclined to take astrology seriously than I was some of the other “alternative” systems for comprehending reality that the author had used to inform his stories of Marvel’s Master of the Mystic Arts; that said, I didn’t assume that my own skepticism regarding astrological concepts necessarily meant that they couldn’t make for a good foundation for an adventure-oriented science-fiction series.  At this point, Englehart’s track record with your humble blogger was stellar (no pun intended), and I was willing to follow where he led, at least for a while.

As for Englehart’s primary collaborator on “Star-Lord”, Steve Gan was considerably less of a known factor to me in late 1975.  While he’d been working professionally in his native Philippines for some time, he’d missed out on being part of the first wave of the “Filipino Invasion” that had begun with the recruitment of a number of the country’s artists by DC Comics back in 1972; rather, he’d had to wait until one of the most prominent artists associated with that wave, Tony DeZuñiga, parted ways with DC and began working for Marvel to get his own shot at the U.S. market.  Working as a member of DeZuñiga’s “Tribe” as well as under his own name, Gan landed several assignments in such B&W titles as Savage Tales and Savage Sword of Conan before being tapped to draw a brand-new, contemporary science-fantasy color comic series conceived by Marv Wolfman, Skull the Slayer.  October, 1975 was arguably Gan’s most highly visible month at Marvel yet, as, in addition to “Star-Lord” and the 3rd issue of Skull, the month also found him beginning a stint as the regular inker on John Buscema’s pencils for Conan the Barbarian, just as that series was kicking off its long anticipated “Queen of the Black Coast” story arc.

And that’s probably enough preamble, don’t you agree?  It’s time to meet Peter Quill, Star-Lord — though as he originally was, rather than how he’d eventually come to be…

As we noted earlier, artist Bob McLeod is supposed to have contributed “some extra assistance” to this story, per Archie Goodwin’s editorial, and the page shown above looks (to my eye, anyway) to be his work.

Returning home, young Peter asked his mother what was up with that weird circle in the forest.  Meredith Quill told him that aliens were supposed to have landed there circa 1930, though of course it was just a story: “There’s no such thing as flying saucers.”  But flying saucers, and their imagined inhabitants, continued to fill Peter’s dreams… up until August 11, 1973.  On that day, Peter was once again walking in the woods, dreading having to start fifth grade the next month…

The next page brings us some more work from Bob McLeod (or at least it sure looks like his stuff to me):

Peter was put in an orphanage, where he remained until his thirteenth birthday — February 4, 1975 — at which time he ran away from the place.  Our narrative now takes a twelve-year leap, into what was then the future of this story’s original readers…

How did the orphaned runaway Peter Quill manage to make it all the way into freakin’ NASA by age 25?  Your guess is as good as mine, as the story never really tells us.

After hearing her friend Betty’s anecdote about Peter Quill, Carol recalled one of her own, involving how the young space cadet impressed his peers with his achievements in training, while at the same time turning everyone around him “right off!”

The furious Peter returned home, then proceeded to get plastered while bewailing the unfairness of his fate to his pet owl, Al…

(Again, the artwork shown directly above appears to be by Bob McLeod. though I could be wrong.)

You might think that Peter Quill had reached the end of his road, here; but, to his credit, he responded to this setback by buckling down and making an effort to play by the rules… and by November 23, 1989, he was standing with other astronauts on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral:

In his survey of the “Filipino Invasion” artists published in Comic Book Artist (Vol. 2) #4 (Sep., 2004), David A. Roach describes Steve Gan’s style as “something of a cross between John Buscema and Al Williamson”.  The influence of Williamson, renowned for his work on EC’s SF comics as well as “Flash Gordon”, seems to me to be especially strong in scenes like the present one.

Once again, Quill’s temper appeared to have sunk any chance of his ever fully realizing his dreams.  Within a week he’d been drummed out of the service, and was once again sent back to Earth, for what this time seemed likely to be forever…

Quill successfully sneaked up on the men guarding the arrow-ships, seizing one’s laser-rifle and clubbing him with it, then threatening to fire on the others if they tried to stop him from taking a ship and flying away…

“He put his laserifle’s blasts where he wanted them!”  It’s not specifically stated that Peter killed either (or both) of the guys we see him take out in the next to last panel above; however, we’re not told they survived the experience, either.

Going by the senator’s outfit, it seems like it’s not just NASA uniform designers that have embraced a Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon fashion sensibility in the 1990 of Peter Quill’s timeline…

Yeah, I’m pretty sure that that guy, at least, is dead.  Though the real question may be, why did Quill turn his weapon on this poor nameless soul, when the object of his greatest ire, Greg Harrelson, is just as obvious (and easy) a target?  I suppose that you could reasonably argue that this guy was holding a “laserifle”, which made him more of an immediate threat — but I suspect that the underlying reason is that Steve Englehart intended for Harrelson to be a continuing nemesis for our protagonist in later stories (though, if he did, he never had the opportunity to follow up on the idea).

At this point in our story — and it’s managed so subtly that even an attentive reader might easily miss it — the narrative voice segues for the first time from the past to the present tense:

In a Star-Lord retrospective published in Back Issue #119 (Apr., 2020), Steve Englehart was asked who or what the Master of the Sun was supposed to be.  The author replied:

He was intended to be God, basically…  Not the actual God right then and there, because He wouldn’t be standing around looking like an old guy.  But they were standing on the Sun and they weren’t dying, so there must have been something going on with him.

“I’m a fraud“, Peter Quill admits in this scene, “maybe a madman and maybe a murderer!”  Again, the most damning interpretation of our protagonist’s violent actions on the space station is neither confirmed nor denied by Englehart’s script.

Peter Quill drops a couple of space opera references in the first panel above that were relatively deep cuts even in 1975, at least as far as the broader popular culture was concerned (and especially as compared with the script’s earlier nods to “Star Trek”).  “Lensman” comes from the fiction of E.E. “Doc” Smith, whose stories (originally published 1934-48) of an interplanetary police force whose members wield a super-scientific weapon called a Lens are often supposed to have been an influence on the Silver Age version of DC Comics’ Green Lantern (who debuted in 1959). Meanwhile, “Perry Rhodan” is a German space opera franchise, created by K. H. Scheer and Walter Ernsting and launched in 1961 by the publishing house Arthur Moewig Verlag — and still an ongoing concern as of this writing.  English translations of the novels were published by Ace Books between 1969 and 1978 (and, at least in the memory of your humble blogger, were ubiquitous on paperback racks for several of those years).

The notion of controlling the “four elements”, reflecting as it does an ancient understanding of the physical world that’s long been superseded by modern science, might seem at first glance to be an odd fit for an SF hero, even one operating in a space opera context — but it actually fits right in with the astrological framework on which Steve Englehart has built his series’ central premise.

Steve Gan really seems to enjoy delineating mayhem, doesn’t he?  But he hardly gets the chance to cut loose before the battle is over and done…

If you know Peter Quill primarily from his Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnation — or even from the mid-to-late aughts Marvel comics from which it was derived — you might not recognize the version of the character we’ve just spent 30-odd pages getting to know as being anything at all like the same guy.  And you might also wonder why anyone would have wanted to write about (let alone read about) this iteration of “the legendary Star-Lord”, who — even if he didn’t commit actual murder in this story (just for the record, I’ve always assumed he did), came way too close to it to be considered in any way “heroic”… at least, not at this stage of his saga.

In 2020, Steve Englehart shared some of his thinking about Peter Quill with Back Issue:

My main idea was, I wanted a guy who was the biggest a**hole in the world, just completely irredeemable, but by the end of the first issue, he’d be talking to the Master of the Sun…  The idea I had was that, over 12 issues [of Marvel Preview],  Quill was going to go outward through the solar system and he would stop on each planet and have an adventure based on the astrology/mythology of the planet.  For example, if he got to Venus, it would be a love story.  When he got to Mars, it would be a war story.  It would be like an anthology in that sense…

 

…I did everything I could to make him unlikable — that was my point. I mean, just the name Peter Quill — both of those names are synonyms for “dick.”  I wanted you to not like him, so that as he became a better person, a more fully rounded person, you would be struck with awe and amazement, watching this guy grow and change.  It was writer’s hubris — “I can do this, I can make this work.”  But we never got a chance to see whether I could or couldn’t…

 

…I do know that once we got to issue #12, Star-Lord was going to be the most self-aware guy in the universe, so cosmic that he would be, maybe, one with God.

Comics readers who’ve followed Englehart’s work over the decades can probably think of another character or two he’s been associated with that could fairly be described as “a**holes” — Guy Gardner, for instance — but whom he nevertheless managed to make interesting, and even (sometimes) sympathetic, if not necessarily likable.  (On the other hand, Guy never actually killed anyone on Englehart’s watch, as far as I know.)  So maybe he could have pulled it off.  But we’ll never know… just as we’re unlikely to learn how the author would have answered any of the several other burning questions which, along with the true identity of the Master of the Sun, and the nature of the Star-Lord, remain mysteries at the end of “First House: Earth!”  Like, who was Peter Quill’s father, if not Jake Quill?  What purpose did the aliens have in coming to the wooded valley near Peter’s home (more than once, apparently)?  Were the aliens that Pete slaughtered in the final pages of the story real, or illusions created by the Master?  And, perhaps most importantly, who’s gonna take care of Al the owl now that his owner has left Earth to go gallivanting around the Solar System?

Of course, some of these questions would in fact be answered by later creators at Marvel — but those answers would, by and large, be very different from what Steve Englehart is likely to have come up with.  And those answers, in turn, would help to shape the future evolution of the character who’d eventually become the Star-Lord recognizable to movie audiences around the world… though that, obviously, is a tale best left to future posts.

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Following the first (and, at least for the next 21 months, only) installment of “Star-Lord” is the first episode (of what will eventually prove to be a total of two) of this issue’s back-up feature, “The Sword in the Star”.  While much less well-known than its lead-in, it has something in common with it… though we’ll need to postpone discussion of that connection until later in the post.

Like the previous story, this one is prefaced by an introductory text article:

I’m not going to reproduce all three pages of this article, as it’s fairly dense, and is much more about the inspiration the feature’s writer, Bill Mantlo, took from various works of myth and legend (most especially Homer’s Odyssey) than it is about the story itself.  But I did want to share at least the beginning with you — in part to give you a flavor of the prose by Mantlo and his co-author, Edward S. Barkan (about whom I’ve been able to find no other information), but mostly for the sake of the accompanying illustration by Keith Giffen and Bob McLeod, which, as it happens, was only the second professionally published work of the former artist, coming just one month after a similar one-off illo by him and McLeod appeared in another Marvel black-and-white magazine, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu #17.

We move on now to the story, which opens with a dramatic and elaborate double-page spread appropriate to its epic aspirations:

The story’s artwork is credited to three individuals — Ed Hannigan, P. Craig Russell, and Rick Bryant — with no clear indication of who was responsible for what; however, the letters page for Marvel Premiere #5 states that Hannigan handled the pencils and Russell the inks (an attribution which, in addition to providing us with the basic division of labor, suggests by the omission of Bryant’s name that his role may have been minimal).

Bill Mantlo’s script never reveals the name of Prince Wayfinder’s father, the king of the Ithacons — but based on a passage in Barkan and Mantlo’s article that compares Wayfinder to Telemachus, the son of the titular hero in the Odyssey, one may reasonably surmise that we’re supposed to identify the dying monarch as a far-future, outer-space version of Odysseus (aka Ulysses), regardless of what his actual appellation might be.  Meanwhile, “Ithacon” is itself clearly derived from the name of Odysseus and Telemachus’ island homeland, Ithaca; and Delphos, the royal wizard, takes his moniker from that of the Greek mythological figure for whom the island of Delphi (famous for its oracle) is also said to have been named.

Just in case you’re wondering, Delphos has a reason for speaking in a 20th century American vernacular utterly unlike the way all the rest of the Ithacons talk — and, thankfully, it’s not because he’s the only unambiguously Black guy we see among their number (or, at least, that’s not the “in-story” reason).  But the explanation for this linguistic incongruity will have to wait for some pages, yet…

After the assault, the black ships hover silently above the battlefield, where only a few of the Ithakon soldiers remain standing…

We’re told that no one (save Delphos, presumably) hears Prince Wayfinder’s scream — because no one else is left alive after this final scourging by the Haamin fleet.  Wanting to get out of the area before the enemy ships make a final pass looking for signs of survivors, Delphos leads the anguished prince into the charred remains of what used to be the royal forest.  “The moons, Circe and Nausikaa, rise above them…”

The bit about the “Teacher” being coin-operated is kind of amusing — although it’s hard to imagine a good reason why a high-tech learning device should have been made that way.

The next two pages find the creative team really going for broke, utilizing varied rendering techniques, photo-collage, and typeset text to evoke for the reader the experience of sensory overload that this info-dump is inflicting on our protagonist.  It’s not completely successful — that white on black text is hard to read, even on a magazine-size page, and clarity is paramount when you’re providing exposition as critical (and dense) as what’s being shoveled out here — but it’s hard to fault the storytellers for their ambition.

As one could only expect by this point, “Alkinoos” is yet another name derived from Greek mythology, where it belongs to a friendly king who hosts Odysseus during the latter’s wanderings.

Looking back on “Alas, the Seeds of Man!” from the perspective of half a century later, its rough spots seem pretty obvious; Mantlo’s script is overly wordy, and the artwork tends to be muddy-looking, with occasionally sketchy rendering and a somewhat indiscriminate application of gray wash tones.  But there’s nevertheless a good deal to enjoy, with some intriguing world-building and imaginative visual design work.  There’s certainly enough promise here to make one wonder what this feature could have developed into, given enough time to work out the kinks.

Unfortunately, the series would be granted only a single other installment, which appeared nine months after the first, in Marvel Preview #7.  This time, the magazine’s cover star was Satana, the Devil’s Daughter — who, being a horror character, wasn’t exactly a natural lead-in for the science-fantasy adventures of Prince Wayfinder.  My younger self hadn’t been following the exploits of Daimon Hellstrom’s sis in Vampire Tales and elsewhere, so I passed on this one, likely without giving it a second thought; I’m not sure I even realized that it included the second “stave” of “The Sword in the Star” (though, to be honest, that fact alone probably wouldn’t have induced me to part with a dollar back in June of ’76).

And so, I didn’t see or read “Witchworld!”, an 18-pager by Bill Mantlo and his new artistic partner on the feature, Keith Giffen (for whom this was his first published comic-book story, as opposed to single illustration).  Naturally, that meant that I completely missed out on the sequence in that story where Wayfinder, having descended to the surface of a habitable planet in search of provisions, encounters a tree with mobile tendrils which seek to ensnare him.  Our hero proves victorious against this ill-intentioned plant… but that’s hardly the end of the scene:

Per interviews given in later years by both Mantlo and Giffen, “Rocky” Raccoon wasn’t originally meant to be more than a secondary, walk-on character in the “Sword in the Star” strip.  But despite there never being a follow-up to “Witchworld” (which, incidentally, ended on a never-resolved cliffhanger involving Wayfinder and Rocky being menaced by a blind witch named Kirke), Mantlo retained a fondness for the character, and eventually brought him back in Incredible Hulk #271 (May 1982) — though with a slightly revised name and his British accent excised, both of which tweaks helped put a little distance between him and his Beatles-song inspiration.  That, in turn, set the character on the long and winding road which, however improbably, would several decades later lead to his teaming up with his old pal Wayfinder’s former Marvel Preview co-star, Peter Quill, as part of a motley band of outer-space heroes who’d eventually call themselves the Guardians of the Galaxy (after the 30th century team of the same name) — all under the supervision of one Keith Giffen.  Funny how things work out sometimes, isn’t it?

As for Prince Wayfinder himself, while he has yet to achieve the fame of Star-Lord or Rocket Raccoon, he at least did get an ending of sorts, as Bill Mantlo eventually revealed that the hero’s quest for the Star-Sword — and for retribution against the Haamin — was successful.  What was more, the Prince of Ithakon had gone on from there to create the Microverse, as revealed in Micronauts #35 (Nov., 1981).  Granted, that might not be as impressive as motion picture stardom, as far as the larger popular culture outside of Marvel Comics fandom is concerned — but it sure beats being left languishing forever on Witchworld, if nothing else.

 

 

 

 

*As we’ll see, in the actual story the character’s name is styled “Starlord”, with no hyphen — but the cover title logo has the hyphen, and that’s the version of the moniker which has stood the test of time… so that’s the one we’ll be using in this and future posts.