Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: The Complete Newspaper Sundays, Vol. 1: 1930-1933

Buck Rogers: The Complete Newspaper Sundays #1

by Russell Keaton, Rick Yager (Artist)

Now for the first time see five complete years of the world's greatest sci-fi newspaper strip in one volume Reprinting the Buck Roger in the 25th Century strips in full color in their original tabloid format, see the gorgeous artwork of Russell Keaton and Rick Yager painstakingly reconstructed in vibrant tones and hues.

Genres: Comics, Science Fiction, Fiction

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Drew]

When I was a kid, my grandfather had a collection of Buck Rogers comic strips that I reread over and over. That collection included portions of "The Martian Invasion of Earth" as well as "Battle on the Moon." And they were great. They were incomplete stories, so I always wondered how those stories resolved. Even though I knew they weren't part of this volume, I was hoping to get the same kind of exciting space adventure as found in that other collection.

Come to find out, the Sunday strips from the collection he had were from the later years when Rick Yeager took over the strip and the storylines were much better. These early Sunday strips are quite juvenile, and stand in stark contrast to the later storylines or even the early storylines of the dailies.

Where Buck and Wilma were the focus of the dailies, the Sunday strips (at first) followed Buddy Deering, Wilma's brother, and Alura who he meets on Mars in the first story. Together they ping-pong around the solar system meeting weird creatures and falling into one scrape after another. Many of the plots involve Buddy and Alura arriving on a planet and turning all antagonists into staunch allies because of their awesomeness. They are practically worshiped wherever they go, even becoming King and Queen of Venus.

And this is ridiculous.

There's a surreal madness to it all, and it feels much like the Oz books of L. Frank Baum: our protagonists wander through weird landscapes encountering weird aliens, giants, dragons, at the mercy of ridiculous physics. It's trippy. And yeah, Oz is a valid comparison.

But as a vision of our rocket-propelled, space-faring future as seen by the writers of the past, it's an interesting artifact. Just don't expect great story-telling. The Rick Yeager strips that come later in the run of the series are much better.

[Dominick]

Credited internally as written by Philip Nowlan and drawn by Dick Calkins, really drawn by Russell Keaton; no author credits on the cover or title page. This is pretty lame stuff. The stories are underdeveloped, silly, and repetitive; basic devices (e.g. someone falling in love with someone at first sight) recur far too much even for work designed to be read at the pace of one page a week. The art's nice enough in some respects, but there are problems with page design, notably with balloon placement. Historically significant, artistically marginal.