Comic oddities: STARCOM (1987)
This 8 page A4 size comic, Starcom, was presented as a pull-out in the middle of a comic or magazine in 1987. (I've long forgotten which title.) It was a promotional item for a new range of toys but what makes it interesting to comics collectors is that it features a six page comic strip drawn by Garry Leach. (Just five years after he produced the memorable visuals for the Marvelman revival with writer Alan Moore for Warrior.)
The 3-D technique for comics was back in vogue at the time and Starcom used it to give a wonderful aspect to Garry's already fantastic artwork. It came free with a pair of 3-D specs, which I'm afraid you'll need to see these pages in all their glory. (Or any 3-D specs from other comics should do the job too.) Failing that, you could improvise your own 3-D Specs by holding a piece of transparent red plastic/film over your left eye and green transparent plastic/film over the right eye.
Here's a few examples from the comic. As always, click on the pages to see them much larger.
The back page of the comic showed the actual toys the strip was based on. They're unfamiliar to me as I was long past the age of playing with toys by 1987 but I'm sure that some of you must have fond childhood memories of them. Feel free to post your comments below about the toys and/or Garry Leach's great artwork.
3 comments:
This was free with EAGLE cover-dated 29 August 1987.
There was also an animated series produced and aired in the States. I think it may have been shown in the UK. VHS tapes with selected episodes were certainly sold here.
The toys used magnets to activate action features or simply to anchor the figures to their craft. Or your fridge.
Thanks for the info! That's great.
They look and sound like good toys. I'm sure they'd have appealed to me if I'd been younger at the time.
haven't good any but i do recognise them.. even for 87, those figures look very cheap.. only a couple of different molds by the looks of things.. smaller scale which was always designed for figures when there was alot of vehicles (it made it much cheaper and easier to make. You want to do MASK or DINO-RIDERS (size based on MASK) if the figures are 12"? no change. these days they scalled figures back down and now has scaled them down even more but without the large amount of vehicles.. so you have Vehicle scaled figures but no vehicles.. cheap ¬_¬;
Oh and Starcom's full name was 'Starcom: The U.S. Space Force' which there 13 episode series was made for. DVD is out i believe but only this year. of course, like with G.I. Joe's 80s return, the whole U.S. angle was dropped for the UK ^_^
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