48: Red Teen Machine

After all that heavy Morituri stuff, I'm taking a breather with a trio of Peter Gillis odds and ends from the late 80's that don't fit anywhere else.

Teen Titans Spotlight #20 (1988) - Cyborg

Pencils: Tom Artis
Inks: Romeo Tanghal

Cyborg gets the headline in Gillis' first published story for DC. However Beast Boy (or was it Changeling at the time?) is along for the ride too. When it comes to Teen Titans, I'm only familiar with the classic Wolfman and Perez run, plus the obnoxious parody cartoon my kids annoy me with. This story, entitled "Blenders From Hell", is somewhat of a halfway house in-between. Cyborg investigates a possessed blender owned by a developer friend of his. It turns out to be some kind of trap for Cyborg, as a Lovecraftian style elder god with the catchy name of Ktktk is trying to break free from another dimension. That's about all the sense I could make out of this chaotic and knowingly silly issue. Tanghal's soft inks are always lovely, but the overlapping panel layouts from Artis are distractingly flashy, as was the fashion at the time. One of Gillis' more throwaway stories.

Justice Machine #13 (1988)

Art: Mike Gustovich

Thanks to comics.org and eBay for revealing this rarity, published by Comico. In the early 80's, Warp inker Mike Gustovich created his own super team, whose premise can be soundbited to "what if the Justice League hailed from a fascist world (unsubtly named Georwell)?" That was all surmised from Wikipedia, rather than this fill-in issue, which appears to be an unconnected flashback.

In a fairly complex setup for a one off, the bland seeming Justice Machine arrive at a complex on an ammonia gas giant, where workers are being killed on the inhospitable surface. Chief suspect is a wild man called Lionheart, who can somehow survive the deadly atmosphere. It transpires he was a member of a previous incarnation of the Machine and has been exiled on this planet for decades. Lionheart helps the JM foil the real threat, tentacled 'boogers' who are guiding people to their heavenly looking world via a portal, purely because they refuse to take him away from this hellish world. There's a moral in here somewhere, but it's buried in a rather cramped, confusing issue, albeit one displaying some interesting concepts.

Savage Sword of Conan #169 (1990) - Red Sonja

Pencils: Steve Carr
Inks: Armando Gil

One of Peter Gillis' last published scripts at Marvel. Finally Gillis got to complete his longtime wish to pen both Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E Howard characters. Sonja meets a fallen angel in the woods, who falls in love with Sonja at first sight. Sonja rejects the angel's advances a quite violently, returning him to heaven. It's an odd tale even by PBG standards, though at 8 pages a little too brief to draw much from. Carr and Gil make for an unlikely yet excellent art pairing.

Next, PBG's first short lived title for DC.

49: Tailgunner Jo