Armagideon Time

Someday there will be a computer powerful enough to calculate the number of sci-fi and fantasy franchises launched by DC during the 1980s. Whether you view these efforts as doomed experiments at creating a market for non-superhero material or desperate bids at challenging Marvel’s successes with Star Wars, Conan and its Epic imprint, the end results were the same — a slew of instantly forgettable titles destined for the purgatory of the quarter bin.

Few were as forgettable as Conqueror of the Barren Earth…

…or, as per my long-standing bargain with Young Master Sims…

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…a limited series follow up to the “Barren Earth” stories that ran for twenty-odd issues in the back pages of The Warlord. Generic to a fault, the premise, characters, and plot threads for the series could have been cribbed from the tables of any small press role-playing game from the era.

It is the distant future! The human disapora returns to a dying desert earth in search of an advantage against the insectoid Qlov! The Qlov are waiting for them and destroy the humans’ spaceship! The Sandy Duncanian heroine, Jinal Ne’ Comarr, must adapt to life on the harsh barbaric Earth of the FUTURE! She meets up with a motley crew of companions, including friendly members of hostile races! They have bubble baths and fight lesbian mercenaries!

The stories from Warlord are pretty standard stuff, bland page-filler going through the accepted genre motions with the stock fantasy elements gussied up with a thin coat of (bad) science-fiction. The limited series, however, takes a massive turn for the creepy…

…and by “creepy,” I mean “Gorean.”

The once resourceful Jinal becomes separated from her companions and captured by Zhengla, a maggot-hued warlord with a fondness for fur onesies. Besides being a ferocious and feared warrior, Zhengla also has a fondness for fungal psychedelics. After a particularly lucid trip convinces the barbarian that Jinal is destined to be his soulmate, he makes it a point to win his lady the old fashioned way — y’know, with beatings, threats, and enslavement.

Jinal, being the hero of the series, rises up to this abuse in a manner befitting her character’s strength and inner dignity…

…by willingly submitting to Zhengal’s rough brand of loving and assisting his plans of bloody conquest.

Whoa, whoa, there, Little Ms. Feminist! Before you blow your top (and crack that pretty glass ceiling), I should inform you that the semi-consensual sex and fists to the face were all part of Jinal’s master plan. Knowing that she couldn’t prevail against Zhengla physically, she decided to bide her time until she could score some payback…

…which she could have done at several points prior to the end of the final issue, but who can figure out what passes for logic among chicks, right?

To celebrate her liberation from two and half issues of humiliation and abuse, Jinal decides to tap into her ex’s stash for a magic carpet ride of her own…

…one that desperately attempted to stoke the demand for a sequel and/or ongoing series. Fortunately for all concerned, the sales figures for Conqueror of the Barren Earth just said “no.”

For its pioneering efforts in spicing up pedestrian genre material with twisted sexual politics, the “Barren Earth” series has been granted the honor of being this week’s Nobody’s Favorite.

My dad swung by the house last Saturday to drop off a selection of old magazines he thought I might be interested in reading and perhaps mining for blog material.  The prize of the lot was the April 28, 1975 edition of Newsweek. 

The issue focuses on the aftermath of the Battle of Xuan Loc and the last stand of the South Vietnamese government, but the real items of retrological interest can be found in the less-travelled ground of the back pages, where pieces like the following item dwell…

These dire warnings of meterological armageddon should ring familiar to present day readers versed in the language of CFCs, cap and trade policies, and carbon footprints, yet it’s astonishingly prescient that a popular science column from 1975 would engage in a serious discussion about…

Yep, you read it right: the “global cooling” trend.

If my brow was of a slightly heavier slope and my knuckles trailed closer to the ground, I might be so bold as to submit this as evidence in favor of relaxing emission restrictions on automobiles and coal-burning power-plants. Or perhaps assert that a former mistaken hypothesis based on erroneous or incomplete data calls into question the viability of the scientific method as a whole. (If the classical eggheads were wrong about geocentrism, who’s to say Copernicus and Kepler, elitist granola munchers both, weren’t also full of shit, right?)

Interestingly enough, though the details and possible remedies differed from the later scientific consensus, other aspects of the impending crisis would remain depressing constants over the decades…

When that Mother Nature chick starts answering to shareholders, then we’ll listen to what she has to say about climate change policy. Now if you’ll pardon me, the valet just drove up with my Escalade.

“If your missile is ‘boring,’ Doctor Sublimation, then why do I feel strangely…excited?”

Recommended listening:  Suicide – Rocket USA (from Suicide, 1977)

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Carrying a synthpunk payload of 50 megatons of subtly insidious dread.