giant karza

Unlike the story Supersilver I wrote in English 1, the inspiration for this piece springs primarily from the Marvel Comics incarnation of the Micronauts toy line, rather than the toys themselves. You could buy both Baron Karza and Pharoid toys, and the very basic story here is exactly the kind of mindless rubbish I’d imagine while I was playing with them. But I don’t think I had the Karza toy (I did have Pharoid) and the other details in the story, scant as they are, were definitely cribbed from the comics. Marvel did a lot of third-party stuff back in the day - comic strips to promote and expand the worlds of movie franchises like Star Wars or Planet of the Apes, and toy lines like Transformers and Rom. I can’t pretend to know a lot about them, but I did buy a lot of comics back in the day and it’s clear even from this badly-drawn effort that I did actually read some of them. The basic premise of the Micronauts comic is this - The Micronauts are tiny, spacefaring beings who live in a microscopic universe known as the Microverse. A team of heroes led by the thousand-year-old Commander Arcturus Rann come together to oppose the forces of the murderous Baron Karza, who has slain the royal family on the Micronauts’ Homeworld, resulting in an epic intergalactic war. Some of the characters (Karza is one, Biotron is another) are from the toy range, but at least half of them (including Arcturus Rann, Marionette and Bug) are Marvel originals. I didn’t buy the original American comics they were written for, but reprints (which I never twigged were actually reprints) popped up in several publications from Marvel UK. I would have first come across them in the pages of Star Wars Weekly (they were a back-up strip in Nos 51 through to 69, January to June 1979) and, around the time I wrote this, got a new lease of life in the Marvel Digest Series of Pocket Books (they ran in Star Heroes Pocket Book Nos 1 to 8). This story, however, is most likely inspired by the Micronauts’ appearance in the Star Heroes Winter Special, which came out the previous term. Having followed the Micronauts to Earth (where they have grown to about three inches high - just like the toys!), Baron Karza has somehow used the power of the Prometheus Pit (a gateway to the Microverse, built by humans) to become even larger and, once he is human size, becomes embroiled in a huge battle with the army at Cape Canavarel. If all that sounds too complicated, maybe just read my adaptation, which boils it all down to: 1. Baddie arrives 2. Baddie powers up 3. Baddie hurts goodies 4. Goodie hurts baddie - The End Take a good look at this template. I suspect we’ll be revisiting it quite a lot over the next few months. Things to like about this comic strip: • I’ve really tried hard to make the logo look like the proper one, both from the comics and the toy range. It’s a much more successful attempt than the one I made for Supersilver, which is one of the reasons I think this must be later. I’ve even extended this to the lettering for ‘The End’ - including the full stop • I’ve tried to convince you this is a real comic by crediting a trio of robots for the writing and artwork, just like they do in 2000 AD. Then completely undermined it by giving them all the lamest possible names • No, that’s it And this is just the first of several. The Micronauts will return. But next time… in pen!!! THE MICRONAUTS WILL RETURN in: THE FUNERAL OF ACROYEAR

March 1980

The Micronauts: Giant Karza!