Battle of the Planets: The Comics
...continued...
One of the Princess series covers
The One-Shots...and Princess
In 2003 Top Cow did individual comics featuring Mark ("Heaven") and Jason ("Hell"). If the choir boy/dark rebel cliche weren't already firmly in place, that would have been a clever way to present them.
I think the Mark and Jason one-shots are my favorite in the entire group of comics. Both Mark and Jason get to wear different clothes (yay!), and even though Jason does go visit a strip club and Red Impulse is ridiculous, I'm willing to look past that. And it probably doesn't hurt that Mark and Jason are my favorite characters, or that the art is in full color.
Later came a manga mini-series for Princess. Though she didn't get color except for online, thanks to John "Melchman" Valimentoshe, she was supposed to get a full six issues (which stopped at #4 when sales got so bad Top Cow couldn't get enough orders to even make it worthwhile print the rest), and I confess to being a tad bitter about that, especially after how much I liked the Mark/Jason one-shots. (Maybe I just hang out in places where there are a lot of women swooning over Mark and Jason, but aren't they more popular than Princess? Hellooo, sales and marketing people!)
Tortosa's art, Melchman's colors. Tortosa says she's in the OAV Jun's clothes while the bartender is the OAV Jun in Gatch II clothes.
I have some issues with the Princess comics. First, she's really histrionic. She doesn't just have emotions. She screams, she bawls (so hard that she drools), she glowers, she hits, she flushes (with irritation, rage, humiliation, mortification, affection, grief—and that's just in volume #3), she pouts, she chortles, she runs out after throwing her communicator on the floor... When she's not doing that, of course, she's doing adorably cute and sexy poses. (Of course, it's a comic, and everything is exaggerated, but nobody else is nearly this hysterical.) In other words, she single-handedly makes a case for why women shouldn't be allowed on an elite ninja team. If this woman gets PMS, the team could either sic her on Galactor all by herself or take cover in the nearest bomb shelter.
I really like the cover of issue #3 (above). I think the reactions of the team in the background are nice—though Mark is looking all surprised again. How on earth does this man lead these people? He seems to be perpetually surprised. (And why is Princess dating him? Clueless doesn't usually equate withgood in the sack, if you know what I mean.)
Jason, meanwhile, who's interestingly more present than Mark in non-birdstyle scenes, swaggers around in a leather jacket, tries to start fights, sneers, and flirts with other men's girlfriends. (I like bad boys, really. I just like the ones who aren't really bad.)
The Crossovers
Three crossover comics appeared in 2003: Top Cow did both Witchblade and Thundercats crossovers, and Wildstorm/DC Comics did a second Thundercats crossover with had nothing to do with Top Cow's.
In the two Top Cow crossovers, the art is done by different new artists, and the style is significantly different than in the main BotP run. Both have a more spare, more modern manga style.
Both of Top Cow's issues were written by Munier Sharrief with art direction by Alex Ross, just as the main BotP run, and the Witchblade crossover focuses far more on Princess, who uses the Witchblade, than the other team members.
Since by this point I was enjoying the art more than the stories in any of the comics, I have to say that I liked the look of the Witchblade pages, and I particularly liked the cover of the Wildstorm/DC Comics Thundercats crossover. Since I'm not intimately familiar with either of the other fandoms (especially Thundercats), I direct you once again to Wendy's reviews.
It is a little odd that David Wohl is the writer for Top Cow's flagship series, Witchblade, but didn't write the Witchblade issue—especially because later he did write the Gatchaman manga.
The Manga
As with the special one-shot Mark and Jason issues, Edwin Davis did the art, and his style is a lot more delicate than Wilson Tortosa's, but that also makes it a little more...well, manga-esque. Some of the drawings were kind of faint in comparison to the strong lines and full color of the other comics, but that improved as the issues went on.
I was more aware of the Mark/Princess relationship in these, though it was definitely in place in the other comic books as well. Though I believed just as much as any child in 1979 that Mark and Princess were together, it was the kind of together you imagine together being when you're 5.
I don't do well with pages-long action scenes, especially with lots of windows without any characters in them. In black and white, all those motion-lines blended together for me. Again, blame it on my lack of comics experience, but I had to force myself to move from panel to panel instead of just turning the page.
The text specifically said that Mark had no time for "frivolity" like Princess' motocross race in the first manga, but three panels later Princess is hanging worshipfully on his arm and he's complimenting her on her setting a new record (which is always the best thing to do when you're undercover—draw attention to yourself).
Like a number of other things in the comics, it just didn't hang together well. But hey, half of the Sandy Frank BotP didn't make sense either, no matter how hard Zark tried. (And we won't even get into the contortions a lot of fans get into trying to explain inconsistencies in the original show...)