Blackstar's Planet Sagar

Recently, I revisited the 13 episodes of the 1981 Filmation Saturday morning animated series, Blackstar. Jason and I watched an episode of Blackstar back in our Classic TV Flashback series. Watching most of the episodes, I feel like I came away with a good sense of the worldbuilding that was (or wasn't) being done to develop the planet Sagar as a fictional place. And I noticed some interesting details.

Sagar is a sparsely populated world. The few cities we tend to be small in area. There is no apparent surrounding farmland or outlying villages. Indeed, I don't think a village is seen in the series outside the arboreal home of the Trobbits. Sparsely populated worlds are common to animated and live action TV science fiction of the 60s to 80s, no doubt for budgetary reasons, but desolation is also a trait shared by Barsoom, the progenitor of literary Planetary Romance. Barsoom, of course, has the excuse of being a dying world and its city-states are presumably grander than what we see on Sagar. With the land of Gondar in episode 13 as perhaps an exception, you might think Sagar is inhabited by only a few thousand people, or even less.

This small population estimate is reinforced by the relatively inhospitable terrain of much of Sagar. We see a of rugged desert, broken by mountains and jungles, and a lot of very active volcanos. There are a lot of ferns and palms in evidence (in alien colors), and perhaps cycads. There is little evidence of grass, much less fields of grain. The Trobbits, the people we see most involved in food preparation, seem to live pretty much exclusively on the varied and fantastical fruit of the Sagar tree. Well, we do see them fishing in one episode, so there's that too.

Illustration from the Dinosaurs Little Golden Book

These details: rugged terrain, sparse grass, and volcanism, really make Sagar resemble the depiction of ancient earth in dinosaur illustration of the midcentury. Combined with the number of large animals/monsters it projects the feeling of Sagar as a primitive or primeval world, a trait it shares with Filmation's portrayal of Mongo from Flash Gordon and the variously named world of The Herculoids.

Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All (1982)

Beyond these Planetary Romance or pulp science fiction elements, Sagar seems to borrow from fairytale fantasy. The show's recurrent opening features a scene of Blackstar and the Trobbits that is clearly an homage to Snow White (1937).

It doesn't end there though. Episode 7 reveals that winter (at least in the vicinity of the Sagar tree, but perhaps on the whole world) only ends when the Cloud Princess Lailana arrives to unlock the box that holds Springtime for the Trobbits. She is pursued on this mission by Creos, the Ice King, who has a flying fortress himself in a storm cloud, outfitted with technological equipment that appears to be made of ice. This is a fairytale like Baum's children's books or some of Jack Kirby's comic book flights of fancy: one that is updated to the technological conceits of its era. In fact, I think a not unreasonable elevator pitch description of Blackstar would be "John Carter of Oz."

With only 13 episodes and the budgets each episode must have had, Sagar isn't as developed as it's progenitor Mongo or it's descendant, Eternia. Still, it's broad strokes portrayal is a window into the conceits and influence that undergird these imagined worlds.

The Incredible Shrinking Particle [Omniverse]

In the waning days of Google+ (remember that site?) I did a series of superhero-themed posts inspired by Wold-Newton essays with the conceits that there was only one Earth (encompassing both the Marvel and DC and possibly other "universes") and the world tended to work like our own, despite its somewhat altered history. This served to both ground the characters in history--making them more "realistic" and making history stranger! The name for the series was taken from Mark Gruenwald's 1979 fanzine about alternate comic book realities.

Like baby Kal-El, those posts were rescued from the dying G+, and the Flashback Universe seems a good place for some of them to crash!

It took a bit of chutzpah for a guy who almost died in an ant-hill on the occasion of its discovery to name a physic-defying particle for himself, but that’s what Hank Pym did in 1961, and somehow, he got it to stick.

He didn’t get there first, of course. That mad genius Miguelito Loveless tortured James West with shrinking in 1875, but that incident was classified. It’s likely Pym’s own experimentation was spurred by the tragic case of Scott Carey, “the Shrinking Man,” a few years earlier. Or perhaps he had heard of Darrell Dane’s exploits as Doll Man in the 1940s? (The late thirties to late forties were the heyday of chemists and pharmacists inventing super-powering concoctions. They were churning them out like they had soft drinks and tonics in the late 19th Century. There was a brief resurgence of this in the late fifties and early sixties, but by the seventies, the FDA and DEA made sure this was only the province of major corporations and government agencies.). At Ivy University, Ray Palmer was making his discoveries around the same time, isolating the magical particles through a lens made from exotic “dwarf star matter.”

On the subject of dwarf star matter, it seems that South America has the largest supply. Alexander “Dr. Cyclops” Thorkel was shrinking things in his lab in Peru. The radioactive cloud that passed over Scott Carey off the coast of Southern California likely originated in South America. Ray Palmer would later discover a hidden civilization of shrunken alien humanoids in the Amazon rainfrost, purportedly made so by a malfunction in their ship’s drive which used dwarf star matter. Perhaps their crash is the ultimate source?

More Lost Marvels

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Fantagraphics' Lost Marvels, a new archive series of presumably non-superhero, forgotten Marvel material. Volume one is out now and is Tower of Shadows, collecting most of the material from the 9 issues of the horror anthology series. Volume two is titled Howard Chaykin vol. 1 and collects his work on several minor Marvel characters like Dominic Fortune.

Volume 3 seems to have been announced last week. It's Savage Tales of the 1980s. Based on the description from Fantagraphics, I assume it collects the eight issues (Oct 1985 - Dec. 1986) of Savage Tales volume 2. Its somewhat artsy cover is amusing to me as it strikes a very different vibe than the typical cover of the actual series:

Anyway, it's interesting to me that an article from April 28 on Comics Beat essential gave a different description and list of contents for this volume:

In November, Fantagraphics will publish Lost Marvels No. 3: Savage Tales. Best known for Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith’s Conan the Barbarian and the first appearance of Gerry Conway and Gray Morrow’s Man-Thing, 1971’s Savage Tales was a stunning comics magazine in the spirit of Creepy and Heavy Metal. This volume will collect all 11 issues of the series featuring work from Stan Lee, John Romita, Dennis O’Neil, Al Williamson, Jim Steranko, John Buscema, and a host of other legendary creators delivering a high-octane combination of fantasy, horror, and action.

This clearly sounds like first run of Savage Tales instead. It clearly would not have included the Conan and Kull stories that appeared in that volume since Titan now has the Robert E. Howard properties license, but presumably the Ka-Zar stuff and other things.

Does the switch mean we won't be getting this material in Lost Marvels? The specificity of "of the 80s" in volume 3 title suggests to me that maybe there is still a consideration of publishing the Savage Tales vol 1 (i.e. "of the 70s") material, but we'll see. 

It doesn't sound like there's more to come. This is what an article from Publishers Weekly back in March had to say:

Subsequent Lost Marvels volumes will include...stories from Marvel science fiction titles like Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction, and action/war material like Doug Murray and Michael Golden’s The ‘Nam. Dean hopes to collect Chamber of Darkness, the companion title to Tower of Shadows, featuring a similar mix of horror and fantasy.