There She Goes Again

Bored, bored, bored. Bored enough to make more inane derogatory comments about everyone's favorite artificial jerkass Futureman Otho.

Here he is, nekkid as the day he came out of a test tube and already he's blasting a hole in somebody. But sometimes he wears clothes.

...except when he doesn't. Everyone should be thankful he's carrying Brain Guy in front of him. The Brain is somehow looking completely horrified even though he doesn't have a face to speak of.

He can occasionally be seen scampering around in a skintight leotard, which is only barely less awful than being nekkid. The odd choice of loafers over say, knee-high space boots leaves something to be desired.

This attractive ensemble from The Comet Kings is reminiscent of that weird neighbor whose yard the police just dug up with a backhoe looking for human remains.

Still no explanation of what purpose the strange antenna array serves. It was mentioned in the first two or three novels but nothing since. The first few magazines in the series had biographies of each of the characters but I'm missing the one with Otho's bio so I'm sure there's some backstory there that was never brought up in the novels. That leaves me no choice but to make stupid shit up. Really, I'm forced to do this.

Let's see, maybe Otho uses his antenna doohickey to suck energy out of the air to survive and occasionally uses it to dry underpants on. We're not certain exactly whose underpants they are, just rest assured that they are in fact underpants.

Happy? I'm not.

I just recently polished off two more Captain Future stories, Magician of Mars and The Lost World of Time, both of which were severely disappointing. Here I was looking forward to more Ul Quorn if only because if Captain Future didn't have an arch enemy he'd have to go back to breaking up space monopolies and we really don't want to have to read any more of that.

If you want to read just one Capt. Future I'd go for The Seven Space Stones just for the sheer amount of wacko plot crammed into one little 95-or-so-page novel. In order to capture bad guy Ul Quorn, Curt Newton and his Futuremen put on disguises, join the circus and follow him around trying to catch him committing a crime; the guys think Curt's dead and bury an impostor then plot sweet, sweet revenge; Curt builds a transmitter out of I dunno dirt and leaves or something; Curt and Ul Quorn cheat at atomic space roulette on the Pleasure Planet so they can win one of the Space Stones, etc. etc. etc. It's cheesy as fuck but it's a good kind of cheesy, like nacho cheese Doritos with Velveeta melted on top and a side order of that cheese dip you bought at the 7-11 at 2 am when you had the munchies but completely forgot about once you got home.

On the other hand, Ul Quorn's return in Magician of Mars was the most anticlimactic sleeping pill I've ever had the misfortune to swallow. Cheesy? Hell no. It was about as un-cheesy as something without cheese on it, like a fireplace log or a Siamese cat. There was none of the chin-stroking, "Well played, Captain Future," like arch enemies are supposed to quip when they'd really rather not be bothered killing or capturing one another. It's as though the editor handed author Hamilton the plot and he just started banging his head on the typewriter and said that was good enough.

Ul Quorn inexplicably gathers up a group of the most pathetic henchmen I've ever seen this side of a Donald Duck comic. They're all criminals who had been put in prison by Captain Future so they're all pretty pissed off, but rather than being murderers and dope smugglers Quorn's got a mine owner from whatever novel that was about the mining monopoly, and the evil rocket manufacturer from Star Trail to Glory which was about a rocket manufacturer destroying his competition and creating a monopoly. It's as though Ul Quorn only broke white-collar felons out of prison and wound up with the future equivalent of Bernie Madoff and the guys who ran Enron.

These low-rent henchmen also die like flies. Hell, even Scrappy-Doo, I mean Johnny Kirk kills one.

Really, the only thing worth mentioning in Magician of Mars is Captain Future finally kisses Joan Randall and it's an indifferent kiss, the sort a nephew would give the elderly aunt who controls his inheritance. "He lightly kissed her." Wow, get a room guys. He was stranded on a strange planet (again) like a million miles from the solar system and in another dimension when Ul Quorn leaves him floating in space. You'd think he'd be way more excited than a "light kiss" when the Futuremen find him. He also doesn't bother to say goodbye to her when he takes off for the moon again, the big jackass.

You'd think this lust-filled scene never happened by the way he behaves in The Lost World of Time. Curt's on the moon, bored, and does he even think about going to Earth to hang out with this woman he finally kissed even if it was pretty lame? Nope. He plays rocketball with his friends then goes off on some random adventure a guy he's never seen before tells him about. He does think about her for one sentence, but that was only to say he was glad she was home safe and I guess not in the Comet getting in the way of guys doing guy stuff.

Anyhow, the Futuremen go back in time a million years to save an ancient civilization nobody's ever heard of and while Curt's there he...dun-dun-dun...kisses some other girl. It's like he just now figured out what to do with women and he's gone all horndog with it. Joan isn't mentioned again, not even as a guilty feeling or his being glad that this other chick is a million years in the past so the two women would never accidentally meet or whatever it is buttheaded guys think.

Oh, and jerkass Otho is less of a jerkass than usual and meets a girl who gets killed saving his life because nobody wants to read about artificial jerky guys getting it on with primitive dinosaur-herding alien women. You know this will mean wall-to-wall jerkassedness in the next novel, right? Hopefully Otho's brand of morose jerkassedness doesn't involve emo crap like poetry.