Thursday, September 13, 2018

Mining for Gold(en): "Trouble In Paradise" by Kashdan, Golden, and Wiacek

Check it out, Groove-ophiles! Here's a cool George Kashdan sci-fi fable, beautifully illustrated by artist Michael Golden and inker Bob Wiacek. While the plot of "Trouble In Paradise" might have seemed a far out when Mystery In Space #113 came out in August 1980, but now...it doesn't seem quite so out there at all...









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9 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 13, 2018 at 7:45 AM

    Well, it's just a whisker outside of the Groovy Age...

    I didn't realise that Michael Golden was ever that cartoonish in any work prior to The 'Nam. Spoke to him at a con last fall for the first time in many years.

    Best regards,
    Chris A.

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  2. AnonymousSeptember 13, 2018 at 6:10 PM

    There are a lot of European & South American comics from the Groovy Age that you haven't touched. Work by Moebius, Hugo Pratt, Alberto Breccia (showcased in Eerie 75), & Victor de la Fuente (whose Haxtur comics were so influential that an award was named after them), to name but a few.

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  3. JMR777September 13, 2018 at 8:06 PM

    1980 technically can be considered the end of the seventies; remember when the millennium started and purists insisted that the new century/millennium wasn't official until 2001? If the purists were right about the start of the new century/millennium, then the 1980's didn't officially start until 1981, making 1980 the last year of the seventies.

    Back to the comic, with the rise of artificial intelligence and smartphones or quantum computers, a fully computerized brain might not be that far fetched or far off. Once again, the comics predict the future with accuracy that futurists would envy.

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    1. Dee MarsSeptember 13, 2018 at 9:41 PM

      It's probably just semantics, but I think you can have a discussion on whether comics and other fantasy media of that time predicted or helped shape the future. When you think that the people who developed the first flip phones probably watched Star Trek when they were young.

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    2. AnonymousSeptember 14, 2018 at 7:26 AM

      In 1971 Neal Adams drew an alien device that a young man finds on a,mountaintop in "A View From Without." It is essentially an iPad.

      The story was first published in Phase One in 1971, & reprinted in 1975 in Marvel's Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #1.

      Regards,
      Chris A.

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    3. keythd23September 15, 2018 at 10:25 AM

      Phase One was an amazing collection of talent!

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    4. AnonymousSeptember 15, 2018 at 11:42 AM

      It was Sal Quartuccio's first publishing effort. He was straight out of college. I remember some of the portfolios he later published, like Wrightson's "Apparitions" in 1978.

      Regards,
      Chris A.

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  4. keythd23September 15, 2018 at 10:32 AM

    Golden has been a wonderful contributor to the comic book world. I rank him 4th greatest talent after Adams, Kirby and Steranko. I much preferred his more serious style in Batman Family and Micronauts to the cartoony style employed in The Nam and here. Still great is great. He's a heck of a nice guy, from small town Wyoming, and always fun to chat with at conventions.

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    1. AnonymousSeptember 15, 2018 at 11:45 AM

      Sad that he has such eyesight trouble, but glad he can work digitally & enlarge the scale of the art. Brian Bolland likewise.

      Regards,
      Chris A.

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