MISC. MANGA, *Battle Of The Planets

Even though anime has been playing in America since the 60s, the first comic based on an anime didn't see ink until 1979. Gold Key had adapted several licenses from Disney to Looney Tunes to Hanna-Barbera, but one of its last titles they did a comic of was Battle Of The Planets. This was the 70s anime series, Gatchamana, which has been redone twice since then for English viewers. Gatchaman was a "science ninja team" that battled the standard monster of the week, a formula that was eventually adopted for numerous sentai show. Sandy Frank had it redubbed and edited for American TV to catch up on the wave of Star Wars mania that was born after Episode IV: A New Hope, which became popular through syndicated television.

The basic premise for the 70s cartoon was that a superhero team codenamed G-Force would repeatedly defend not only the Earth but other planets from attacks by the menacing forces of Spectra lead by the masked Zoltar. The team of Mark, Jason, Princess, Keyop, and Tiny flew around in their superjet, the Phoenix, and would stop Zoltar's various attempts to take over the world, while being in constant contact with their robot operator, 7-Zark-Z, an R2-D2 addition to the American version to help bridge various episodes for the edited English dub. The comic series took some liberties with this by doing things that they didn't have the resources for in the cartoon. Most of these involved 7-Zark-7 actually getting kidnapped by Zoltar, giving all the members of G-Force their own individual mini-spaceships to be able to go on separate missions on other planets, plus the bizarre rewrite of making Keyop into an android instead of a test tube baby which was the show's explanation for why his speech patterns were so scattered. The comic also had more Saturday Morning-styled plots with brainwashing pirates, robot duplicates, and giant monsters that weren't just huge mechas that G-Force would periodically tangle with. The biggest leap the comic made over the original anime was that the other alien worlds G-Force would travel to were always inhabited by humanoids, where as here the aliens look more like something out of a Star Wars cantina, with the final issue showing G-Force for once not fighting Specrta and instead helping rescue an entirely different species move to a different planet.

The Gold Key comic was written by Gary Poole, who previously worked on comic adaptations of Flash Gordon, King Kong, and The Twilight Zone. The artwork was supplied by Win Mortimer with a long track record drawing various superheroes such as Batman and Superman, which gives the characters look like they just popped out of Superfriends, with plenty of comic covers mixing up the G-Force's uniform colors. The entire 10-issue comic was collected into a single edition by Dynamic Forces if you want to check out the entire run. Otherwise, you'll have to go around digging through old comic book bins for the original issues.