Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis

by William Messner-Loebs, Karl Kesel, Dan Barry

Story by William Messner-Loebs and Dan Barry ( The Bloody Sands of Time), inks by Dan Barry and Karl Kesel (World's Finest). Sensational cover painting by Dave Dorman.

Genres: Comics, Adventure, Graphic Novels, Graphic Novels Comics

117 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

William Francis Messner-Loebs (born William Francis Loebs, Jr.) is an American comics artist and writer from Michigan, also known as Bill Loebs and Bill Messner-Loebs. His hyphenated surname is a combination of his and his wife Nadine's unmarried surnames.

In the 1980s and 1990s he wrote runs of series published by DC Comics, Image Comics, Comico, and other comics publishers, including DC's superhero series Flash and Wonder Woman among others. Additionally he has both written and drawn original creator-owned works, such as Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire.

Reviews

[Brad · Rating 2 out of 5]

All the elements you'd expect from a good Indiana Jones story are present in The Fate of Atlantis, but that doesn't mean the Dark Horse graphic novel (originally a mini-series) is actually good.

In fact, it is pretty awful.

But before I talk about how awful The Fate of Atlantis is, here's what an Indy story needs:

1. Indy searching for a dangerous artifact surrounded by a mysterious and powerful myth. Check.

2. Indy hopping from continent to continent. Check.

3. Indy running around with a beautiful girl in tow. Check.

4. Indy racing against Nazis or some other anti-"free world" bogey-enemy. Check.

5. Indy getting shot and/or knifed and/or thoroughly pummeled. Check.

6. Indy moving from one chase sequence to another, one action sequence to another. Check.

7. Indy always keeping his hat on. Check.

If nothing else, The Fate of Atlantis scores in each and every category. What a shame that these elements aren't executed better. I'll get to how they're not in a minute, but first I need to talk about the character of Indiana Jones.

You see, the crew at Dark Horse comics (undoubtedly green lit by the ever questionable George Lucas) never captured the spirit of Indy. Sure he does all the things he's supposed to do, but he never does them right. His playfulness is forced, his relationship with Sophia (his psychic link to Atlantis) is as convincing as Richard M. Nixon's "I'm not a crook" speech, and his dialogue has more in common with the worst of Mike Hammer than with the Indiana Jones of film (he repeatedly says, "Eureka," and I can guarantee he's never said "Eureka" anywhere in any film). When Indy isn't Indy, and he sure isn't Indy in The Fate of Atlantis, the adventure is in serious trouble.

And that trouble is compounded by nearly every classic ingredient that should have made the story a winner.

Atlantis and its supply of orichalcum, a sort of Greek God plutonium, is too silly, too "made up," to sustain the story. Indy's travels from continent to continent are a bit of a joke, driven more by obligation than the requirements of the story. Sophia is intended as a wacky Katherine Hepburn-style "girl Friday," but her execution is more like Whoopie Goldberg in Ghost. The Nazis of The Fate of Atlantis are even less frightening than the Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The action sequences, beyond their natural and acceptable diminishment from screen to page, are so uninspired that Indy gets shot in the shoulder...by a Nazi...again.

Yep, The Fate of Atlantis is crap, and even the art is boring.

So why two stars? Well...I am a sucker for Indiana Jones (even bad Indiana Jones), and I read it with my son. He thought it was pretty damn cool, so that's enough to make me think it was okay. But only just.

[Miloš & Brontë · Rating 5 out of 5]

Papa: Come here and write your Indiana Jones review, Loš.

Miloš: Oh yeah!

Papa: Go get your stool.

Miloš: Okay. Got it. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Well, Indy didn't find anything, but he did find some skulls with horns on them, and I liked that Kerner just went into an ugly face, then a skeleton face, then a face that we couldn't see his eyes and then he just exploded. Then I like that there was lots of lava, balls (orichalcum), and I liked that Kerner ran into it himself, and his hat came off and then he...uh...

Papa: That was how he died, wasn't it?

Miloš: Yeah. And then I like how Indy's other friend won the handball game.

Papa: Wasn't if football.

Miloš: No it was handball because football is soccer.

Papa: Of course. Sorry.

Miloš: So that's all I like about it.

[Philologios · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pulp fiction. Es lo que es y es lo que hay que pedirle.

[Ill D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most-all the intellectual property of the now defunct LucasArts license that I grew up with, Indy too found his way into a cornucopia of serialized paper-backed comics beginning with the Marvel movie adapts of the 80’s to Dark Horse’s offering of semi-original content in the early to mid 90's. Yet without an extended universe of sorts to wrap itself around any further manifestations of Indiana Jones must be accordingly and tightly self-contained. With only scraps of fictional archaeology to be molded unto the canon of established narrative I tread tepidly into this first post-Last Crusade offering of sequential art.

While unabashedly perforated with the puerile muck of comic-book hijinks of time immemorial to be fair, it mostly stays true to the internal ethos and prefabricated structures of that I expected to Indiana Jones as applied to the comic form. However, hardly remaining perfectly faithful to the typical Indy formula the essentials are mostly there no matter how warped to fit the confines of a 100 page volume. Female love interest: check. World jet-setting: check. Archaeological related mcguffin: kinda check.

With these manifestations in mind, this comic’s greatest strength is its faithfulness. To be sure however, it is without the length and breadth of narrative to have been made into a movie yet what made Indy so memorable is adequately doled out here. There’s action. There’s Nazis. And so is all the artifacts of an orientalized perspective via the British Empire building that built the planet we live in now.

But for all its successes, there’s a’plenty complainable. There’s nothing particularly exciting to write home about. And these positives merely rim the orbit of nostalgic excellent of the original trilogy. Yet ultimately, this very first step in the post-Crusaders post-cinematic timescale is a moderately welcome and worthy addition to the Indy mythos.

[Hippocleides · Rating 2 out of 5]

And now for something that is perhaps ridiculously niche--a comic book series which is an adaptation of an Indiana Jones point-and-click adventure PC game from the early 90's.

Simply put, I wouldn't recommend this to anyone except those dozens of people who are big fans of the original game. The covers of the issues are nice (for however much THAT matters), but the artwork inside is far more dodgy--Indy doesn't resemble Harrison Ford in the slightest, Sophia Hapgood is conventionally attractive and cliche Bond girlish to the extent that she is completely forgettable, and the Nazi villain Klaus Kerner, who was a mass of blonde Aryan pixels in the old PC game, looks like--and I think is unintentional--Walt Disney in a Wehrmacht uniform. From a very surface point of view, it feels very Indiana Jonesesque, as the protagonists whisk from locale to locale, engaging in two-fisted pulp adventure with the Nazis in hot pursuit, but the banter between Indy and Sophia--and all the dialogue in general, frankly--is pretty awful, and a pale simulacrum of the Spielberg movies. And while the fast pacing of the original movies fit well with the Republic serials from the 30's, in this instance it doesn't seem to work in comic book form, where everything seems to be moving too fast and is far too interrupted by "action scenes" to have any overall impact. It didn't take too long before I was skimming through the pages, because it was obvious that the material within was fluff. In a way, it feels like the comic itself--with its stilted style, fast pace, and superficial content--wasn't merely taking place WW2 era, but actually written during it, rather than the early 90's. I can't help but feel like fans of 50's Batman comics would get a kick out of this far more than the modern reader, though to be fair I have no idea what a standard comic book is like these days.

There will be a modicum of interest for the PC game fans as they trace the journey to Atlantis, which follows the game's narrative pretty closely. Some of the artwork of ruins, artifacts, bones, etc is alright, I guess. In some ways this comic book is a relic itself--a view into the time when Lucasarts was still pushing the Indy label a bit, and its brand of archaeological adventures wasn't completely usurped by the likes of Uncharted, Tomb Raider, and the various mutant offspring of Dan Brown's works, like the National Treasure movies. But ultimately, this is an utterly unnecessary and forgettable entry into the Indiana Jones universe--just like about 99% of the other stuff out there that isn't the original trilogy.

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

Nice beginning, nice ending. I know this is meant to be fun and fantastic, just like the Indy films and just like regular old-school comic books. But the middle portion of this is just a mess, I couldn't understand how plot points flowed at all so ultimately just didn't much care. But the opening page artwork is a beauty, and so I turned the page and read the whole thing anyway.

[Max Z · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Mein gott! Doktor Illinois Chones, I'll wager!"

Ah, nostalgia. This book is (pretty loosely) based on the classic Lucasarts adventure videogame of the same name, though there is a lot more shooting in the comics. In fact, I don't even remember Indy having a revolver in the adventure games. He always used his whip, though.

[Dony Grayman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rentapado de la serie originalmente publicada en revistas. Ejemplar con la portada dañada pero el encuadernado aguanta.

[Variaciones Enrojo]

Taco recopilatorio que traduce Indiana Jones & The Fate Of Atlantis.

[Pedro Plasencia Martínez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Una adaptación en cómic sacada de la famosa aventura gráfica de LucasArts. Este título fue durante un tiempo la cuarta película oficial de Indiana Jones, pero el destino quiso que al final quedase al margen del mundo cinematográfico y se optaron por otros proyectos que decepcionaron bastante. La verdad es que este formato de viñetas tampoco le hace mucha justicia al guion original del videojuego, aunque quizá los dos primeros números están por encima del resultado final porque se toman su tiempo en explicar y en enlazar bien los datos desde el comienzo de la historia hasta la presentación de los personajes y del mito de Atlantis, con sus codiciados artefactos desperdigados por el mundo tras la excavación de Islandia.

Después de esta introducción y de algún viaje, la historia se acelera demasiado y se salta momentos muy simpáticos y memorables que muchos jugadores veteranos recordarán con cariño. Creo que no les habría costado nada integrarlos con fidelidad en estas páginas, porque de hecho los autores contratados por Dark Horse luego sí se atreven a alargar la trama con contenido inventado que no resulta imprescindible y que se siente como relleno básicamente, así que no tienen excusa. Es un caso donde la divergencia con el material original no le sienta bien a la obra, supongo que quisieron que fueran dos experiencias distintas con algunos momentos parecidos y poco más. Para los coleccionistas puede resultar interesante, pero me da la impresión de que ni los compradores habituales de cómics ni los espectadores de la trilogía original quedaron completamente satisfechos con este producto.

ENGLISH
A comic adaptation taken from the famous LucasArts graphic adventure. This title was for a time the fourth official Indiana Jones film, but fate wanted it to remain on the margins of the cinematographic world and other projects were chosen that were quite disappointing. The truth is that this vignette format does not do much justice to the original script of the video game, although perhaps the first two numbers are above the final result because they take their time to explain and link the data well from the beginning of the story until the presentation of the characters and the myth of Atlantis with its coveted artifacts scattered around the world after the excavation of Iceland.

After this introduction and some travels, the story speeds up too much and skips very nice and memorable moments that many veteran players will remember fondly. I think it would not have cost them anything to faithfully integrate them into these pages, because in fact the authors hired by Dark Horse then dare to lengthen the plot with invented content that is not essential and that basically feels like filler, so they have no excuse. It is a case where the divergence with the original material does not fit well, I suppose they wanted them to be two different experiences with some similar moments and little else. For collectors it may be interesting, but I get the impression that neither regular comic book buyers nor viewers of the original trilogy were completely satisfied with this product.

[NoImporta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just as gruesome and weird as I remember. I've never played the game but if it follows the same plot structure then I guess it should be better? The comic bounces locations and places like a pinball and there is no mystery to how any of the relics work, you just see characters use them as if they're a common occurrence in-universe (e.g. a well known excavation site suddenly has buttons that No One has found despite years of people being there before).

Overall the comic feels as if I need to play the game to understand the full story and that speaks ill about the writers, first because you lose any connection to Indiana as a seasoned archeologist/adventurer and second his last adventure -in which he proved the Christian god exists- is just retconned.

Bear that in mind as in this adventure he dismisses an Actual (in-universe) plausible research as mumbo-jumbo, finds proof of Alien technology and never bats an eye, battles New nazis stereotypes with no interesting traits, allies with ANOTHER old "quasi-conquest" which BTW he's always calling "Kid" -and apparently almost RAPED when they were adventuring- and finally falls to every single trap the plot throws at him (so this Indiana Jones is as clumsy as he'll ever be -maybe so many hits to the head are catching up with him-).

Overall the story is boring, the drawings are ugly (Marcus looks like Nixon), the locations look plain and uninteresting (you have ONE good panel in the whole comic), the new characters are just derivatives of the old characters from the series (and are mainly white), THERE ARE ALIENS and the whole point of the series -adventuring- amounts to nothing at the end.

Maybe try doing a series of these comics Netflix?

Edit: I just checked the game and it looks WAY better, I'll play it to see how different is from the comic. Wish me luck.

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I absolutely love the game that this was based off of. It's a puzzle game, and I played it in high school. I must admit I used a walkthrough online for almost the entire game, since it was (at times) so incredibly frustrating. So, when I finally sat down to read my volume one omnibus of Indiana Jones comics (in excitement for Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, which was fun), I was INCREDIBLY disappointed. It was as if someone was given fifteen images of the game, told a two-sentence summary of it, and then was told to jam it into a short, itty-bitty comic. The original game had so much life and sense of wonderous exploration in it, similar to the movies. But this comic made it much more like the non-Spielberg movie (The Dial of Destiny) where Indiana Jones is a caricature of who Indy really is. Making Indy too much of a sarcastic jokester (The Great Circle did this with the jokes too, even though I think it was a rather fun enough of an interpretation of Indiana Jones), is just a poor attempt of capturing Harrison Ford's spirit of an actor. Further all the side characters, even Sophia who was a great sidekick in the game, were made to be one-dimensional.

When I was younger, I must admit, I thought 'oh anyone can play Indiana Jones if they reboot it!' Now, I know that (other than The Great Circle and the original The Fate of Atlantis video games), I cannot see Indiana Jones properly being portrayed by an actor in a film or in a comic.

I read online that someone said that the original video game is considered the 'proper fourth film.' I do like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Seeing Indy finally settle down makes me very happy, and I like the shift of tone to a 50s alien sci-fi pulpy story rather than a 40s Nazi adventure sci-fi pulpy story. Nonetheless, I will admit that the original The Fate of Atlantis really is more of an Indiana Jones story, and maybe one day, it can be adapted to the screen with better technology that warrants it. I would love my Dad and other people to experience this story, but the original video game, and this comic, is not exactly worth it for most people.

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unfortunately, very disappointed by this one. The first and last issue were actually a fun (albeit, shallow) time, but that's about it. The middle of this story moved entirely too quick, and turned into a giant, nonsensical mess. This is quite saddening, considering I heard so much about how great this story is, and how it's touted as "a better fourth outing for Indy compared to what we got" which honestly... it's not. Maybe the game is a lot better and that's the best version of this story, but for now, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis is cool concept for an Indy adventure, that just failed to impress me.

2.5/5.

[Fabulantes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reseña: https://www.fabulantes.com/2017/06/in...
"Las llaves de Atlantis (...) corrió en paralelo, y con independencia, de su alter ego pixelado, Fate of Atlantis (1992). Por eso ambas versiones mantienen justas distancias y notables diferencias. (...) Dan Barry (...) no empleó más molde que el de su libertad creativa e imaginación (...). Por eso, al conocedor del juego (...) le resultará extraño el producto dibujado por el estadounidense, casi ajeno. Y eso a pesar de ser de factura notable".

[Gloria Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Surprisingly different from the game, but ultimately I do prefer the game version. The comic feels like it reshapes the game's narrative into a more traditional structure for an Indy adventure but it also highlights some of the core issues with the narrative which gets a bit convoluted, both in plot and lore, and doesn't have the characters to really hold afloat. But if you want a fun little Indy adventure, it's at least original. But I'd recommend the game over this.

[Jeff Dugan · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a great companion to the Point-and-Click LucasArts game of the same name. Unlike other adaptations, however, the written version relies on the readers experience with the game.

I enjoyed the deeper context, but it tries too cram too much into too little.

3 stars for pulp-y fun.

[Nightwing’s Thiccness · Rating 3 out of 5]

All of the dialogue matches how the movie counterparts speak but all of the extra American characters are written to have the Trans-Atlanticiest accents possible. Hilarious, but weird to be in an Indiana Jones story. Nice adventure story otherwise, it’s got the spirit of the movies.

[Jordi Salazar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Curiosidad bastante interesante

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

This'll be of interest to fans of the game, mainly as a curio - I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.

[Esdras Lopez · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish this was a movie, or at least an episode of an animated show

[Timo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Olipas tämä mainio. Hyvin saatu mukaan se aito Indiana Jones tunnelma, se joka sai kaikki rakastumaan elokuvasarjaan.
Tosin taiteilijalle taisi tulla loppua kohden vähän kiire asian kanssa, sillä kuvat muuttuivat huomattavan luonnosmaisiksi.

[Matt Bouchard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Always a sucker for a good Indy story. Even more if Atlantis is involved. And what better villain for Indy than Nazis! This series is pretty solid, could do without the melting abominations though. Not my favorite interpretation of Atlantis. But overall pretty cool.