Friday, September 20, 2013

Life On Mars!


Mars is a smart sassy sci-fi tale which blew across the comics landscape in the midst of the early 80's Indy burst, made a mark and then disappeared. That was the case until a few years ago when IDW put out a rock solid trade of this idiosyncratic story of life on Mars. This was one of First Comics most idiosyncratic comics, and alas one of the few which didn't latch onto a sufficient audience to run its full fourteen issues, but sadly the initial story was squeezed into twelve. All twelve are here and more.


The scenario is this, a striking redhead named Morgana Trace motivated by her genius and her profound injuries leads a scientific mission to begin to terraform Mars. Morgana lost the use of her legs when young and her father was killed also by by an act of violence. She grows up to create technology which contributes to the terraforming of Mars and which under that lesser gravity might restore her own mobility which is assisted by mechanical means. But after starting the mission the team loses contact with Earth and fearing the worst, goes into a ten thousand year hibernation while the Martian landscape beneath them changes to meet their needs. But when Morgana revives she finds herself alone save for the ship's computer and she goes to find her comrades.

What follows is a raucous and sometimes hallucinatory adventure as she discovers much about her surviving comrades, the planet , and herself. This volume is loaded with background information by Mark Wheatley and Marc Hempel on the creation of this story and gives real insight to the rather deep meaning of it all.













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