Planet X Sketchbook: Valkia

X-Year begins!

Here's a "warm-up sketch" of the sexy Strato-Pirate Queen Valkia, by series artist Gene Gonzales.

Enjoy, and have a great 2008!

You Never Forget Your First

The first Interplanetary Swashbuckler I ever read was Warriors of Mars by Edward P. Bradbury.

I found the beat-up paperback book on the school bus when I was in Junior High (the scan here is that actual copy, which I still have). Dutifuly, I turned it in to the bus driver, who placed it in his "lost & found" box. A week or so later, it was still there, so he said I could have it.

I had no idea at the time that the book was written by fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock, nor that it was a homage to the Martian novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. All I knew was that the adventures of Earthman Michael Kane on prehistoric Mars thrilled me and ignited my imagination.

I'd already read Burroughs' Pellucidar, but didn't become aware of his Martian novels until DelRey re-released them in the mid-Seventies with those gorgeous Michael Whelan covers. Ironically, it was the Whelan covers on the DAW editions of the Elric books that got me to buy the work of Michael Moorcock.

Now, I've since picked up a couple of different versions of this novel – under Moorcock's own name and the revised title of City of the Beast – and it's still one of my favorites of the genre, along with its two sequels. I've read online that there's a graphic novel adaptation of this book that's been recently published, but I haven't seen it myself.

Anyway – what was your first exposure to the genre?

Pencils by Gene Gonzales

Here are a couple pages of Gene's pencils from Issue #2 of Perils on Planet X. Click on images for enlarged view. Enjoy.

Space Babe #2

Most serial heroines are pretty, but usually virtually asexual – girl "pals" for the heroes or someone to make coffee and be rescued on occassion. Didn't want to threaten those pre-pubescent boys that made up the majority of the audience, you know. Jean Rogers, who played Dale Arden in the first two Flash Gordon serials, was one of the very few serial heroines allowed to be sexy.

And, man, she sure was!

In fact, the first Flash serial is one of the only serials I've seen that actually has any sort of romantic subplot or sexual subtext. Heck, it's one of the very few where the hero even kisses a girl!

Flash Gordon (1936) is the most overtly sexualized kid's serial of all, with scores of scantily-clad slave women, exotic dancing girls, the predatory Princess Aura, and poor, virginal Earthwoman Dale Arden – ardently pursued by the lascivious Ming and Prince Vultan of the Hawkmen and forced to forsake her conservative Earthly attire for brief, bare-midrift shifts.

Massachusetts-born Jean Rogers won a national beauty contest in 1933 and was offered a contract by a Hollywood producer. She was soon signed by Warner Bros., and a year later jumped ship to Universal. She began appearing in several of the studios' serials, including Flash Gordon, Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars and Secret Agent X-9.

Universal took her out of the serial unit and put her in a string of B pictures. Unsatisfied with the way her career was going, and the fact that the studio refused to give her a raise, she left Universal for 20th Century Fox in 1939. Two years later Rogers left Fox for the same reasons she left Universal, and signed with MGM, where she found the treatment more to her liking. She walked off the Culver City lot in 1943 when studio boss Louis B. Mayer discovered that she planned to get married, and forbade her to do so. She freelanced for a few years, and after making The Second Woman in 1951, she retired to raise her family.

She died in 1991, but will always be remembered as the interplanetary adventuress and most beautiful woman of two worlds, Dale Arden.

Hawke of the Lost Planet

Thanks to an unexpected, unsolicited mention over on the Newsarama blog, I've had a bit more traffic here today than I expected. For those who may have wandered over here and are wondering just what the hell Perils on Planet X is, here's a brief synopsis and history.

PLANET X – known to its inhabitants as Xylos – is the "lost" planet between Mars and Jupiter, several hundred million years ago. Colonel Donovan Hawke, a 21st Century American astronaut, is stranded there after his spacecraft passes through an unclassified spatial-temporal anomaly.

Upon his arrival on the jungle planet, he is quickly embroiled in adventures with the planet's savage predators and its humanoid inhabitants. Among the latter are Kain and Valkia, of the deadly aerial Strato-Pirates and Aeon, a diminuitive immortal. But most notably, there's the gorgeous and courageous alien princess, Odyri of Empyr, who wins the errant Earthman's heart.

POPX is an interplanetary swashbuckler in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon, and similar works by Otis Adelbert Kline, Leigh Brackett, Lin Carter and others.

A few years ago, I debuted POPX as a webcomic, originally hosted on the short-lived AdventureStrips subscription site. The artist was Jon Plante (that's his version of Strato-Pirates Valkia and Reddjac at right). When AdventureStrips folded, the strip ended in mid-story.

A couple years later, I was approached by a small publisher looking for a new comic book title. I suggested reviving POPX in comic book form, and they were amiable. Jon chose not to return to the planet Xylos, so I searched around for a new collaborator, finally finding the perfect artist in Gene Gonzales. I was particularly impressed by all the gorgeous drawings in his portfolio of Burroughs' Dejah Thoris character. Gene draws extraordinarily sexy women....

Well, making independent comics often takes a long time, and the publisher sadly ended up shutting down operations before our book was completed. Jump ahead another year or so, and I'd just managed to place a different creator-owned comic book series (Femme Noir, with art by Joe Staton) at up-and-coming hotshot publishers, Ape Entertainment. Still hoping to get the now-orphaned POPX book off the ground, I ran the project past Ape's top bananas, and they liked it... so here we are.

The three-issue miniseries (unofficially known as POPX Book One: Hawke of the Lost Planet) is tentatively scheduled for a mid-2008 premiere.

If you're a fan of Burroughs, or Flash Gordon, or plain old high adventure with smart, dashing heroes, strong, sexy heroines, monsters and interplanetary derring do, you'll probably dig Perils on Planet X.

Keep watching this space for updates.

Xylos: Now in Color!

After many months and multiple samples, we've finally nailed down a colorist to apply the hues to our little interplanetary romance. Welcome aboard Ian Sokoliwski!

He'll be working closely with series artist Gene Gonzales to fully realize the fantastic lost world of Xylos.

Ian's try-out page is posted above, and I think he's going to bring a lot to Donovan Hawke's adventures.

Inspirational Image #1