men in space

More lazy rubbish, with no characters and no future. The pencil’s so faded here it’s getting difficult to read (I’ve had to muck about with the contrast a bit to make it vaguely acceptable) but it’s obvious I didn’t have a plan for this tale beyond the opening panel. The top part of the page promises ‘Men in Space’ and fearsome insectoid aliens with laser guns for hands. What we actually get is a giant lizard and a satellite from the 1950s. Not what I came here for - money back, please. On the other hand, this is monumentally crazy. We’re promised “a future shock” (like Tharg’s Future Shocks in 2000 AD) and I have to admit, there’s probably little more shocking than finding out the entire solar system is about to be swallowed by a massive dinosaur. Yes, I did something like this before, when Earth was attacked by a gargantuan pink cyclops in Great Space Battles, but this is on a whole new scale. Even more surprisingly, Sputnik 1 now has personnel - pretty good going for a metal sphere 23 inches in diameter. Even if we allow that this isn’t the original Sputnik but a much larger vessel with a similar name, I do wonder why Earth hasn’t already noticed the reptilian colossus heading towards them when Sputnik radios it in. Presumably it’s got something to do with them being in space and therefore closer to it? This might be too difficult to make out but if you blow up the last panel and look inside the monster’s mouth, the young Waen has drawn all the planets in the solar system (as we then understood them) in the right order, showing the humongous reptile approaching the system from the outside in - swallowing Pluto first, with the sun furthest away by his lips. Nice of him to wait till the spheres were all in alignment. You can tell it’s the solar system because there are nine planets, the fourth and fifth from the left are clearly Saturn (with its rings) and Jupiter (with its big spot) and the four nearest the sun are surrounded by a belt (I may have misconstrued the asteroid belt a little here). The speech bubble saying ‘AAH!’ appears to be coming from a tiny dot somewhere out near Mars, so yes, it’s closer to the creature than the Earth is. So I’ll let me off. Maybe I did think this through after all? No, I didn’t. It’s a hastily-scribbled load of rubbish I did in a hurry, starting out as one thing before rapidly escalating so far, not only is it prematurely over, no stories can ever be told in that universe again. My desire to shock you with pure, undiluted excitement has led to a complete meltdown, a rug pull so severe that it effectively destroys your ability to trust me as a writer. Basically, I haven’t just ended the story - I’ve ended my entire writing career. Unless of course this is just the prelude to an even stranger story, which takes place in the stomach of an impossibly large space beast. And inside that stomach, men in space encounter fearsome insectoid aliens with laser guns for hands. But if I’d intended that, I would have written Part 2, wouldn’t I?