Comics News: Defenders of the Earth and Space Dock 7

Together Again: The Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Mandrake the Magician



I got an email from Dynamite Entertainment last week about their now having King Features' top three characters. According to the press release, this is the first time that Phantom, Flash Gordon, and Mandrake have been under the same publisher in 43 years. Which makes for some cool crossover possibilities.

I'm mostly curious to see how they handle Flash. I know nothing about Mandrake, so they can do whatever they want with him, but I'm not at all excited about their version of the Phantom. I've heard good things about their Buck Rogers though, so maybe Flash will be okay. I hope so, 'cause I'd really like to read some new, good Flash Gordon stories.

It sounds like they'll be starting with a faithful re-telling of the origin story:

Dynamite's comic book story begins as Earth is bombarded by fiery meteors. Dr. Zarkov believes the meteors are from outer space and invents a rocket ship to locate their place of origin. Half mad, he kidnaps Flash and Dale, whose plane has crashed in the area, and the three travel to the planet Mongo, where they discover the meteors are weapons devised by Ming the Merciless, evil ruler of Mongo.

Space Dock 7



The webcomics portal that was teased back in February is live and full of awesome scifi comics including some I've mentioned here before and some I'm brand new to.

Comics and Book News: Atlas, Avatar prequel, and Space Dock 7

Atlas



Marvel's rebooting Agents of Atlas again, calling it just Atlas now. I'm not so excited about the inclusion of 3D Man, but as long as it still has a talking gorilla, a mermaid, a spaceman, a super spy, a killer robot, and Jeff Parker's writing it, they can call it whatever they want. CBR's got an interview with Parker about the whole deal.

Avatar prequel



James Cameron's writing a prequel novel to Avatar to tide us over until the next movie. I suppose that's pretty cool, except that the plot sounds a bit over-ambitious to me. Avatar-producer Jon Landau described it as going "into much more depth about all the stories that we didn’t have time to deal with — like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake’s brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that."

Now, James Cameron isn't Matthew Costello, but this reminds me a lot of Costello's King Kong: Island of the Skull prequel novel to Peter Jackson's King Kong. That novel also tried to follow several different plotlines leading up to the movie (Carl Denham's, Ann Darrow's, and the guy who discovered Skull Island) and never did figure out how to merge them all together to tell a cohesive story. Which, of course, is because that was the movie's job. I'm not sure how Cameron is going to do that with Avatar either though and I'm skeptical.

Space Dock 7



I don't know anything about this except that it's coming in April and some of my favorite cartoonists are doing it (Grant Gould, Katie Cook, Otis Frampton, and Mike Maihack to be exact). I'm guessing it's a webcomic and with a name like Space Dock 7, it sounds pretty cool. The teaser page is here.