Quick, Let’s Make Love, Before You Die: DEATH PLANET

This is a part of Discourse 2000, a year-by-year, story-by-story look at 2000AD. Contains spoilers for Death Planet.

WHICH THRILL?: A colony ship crashes on an extremely hostile planet. Can Captain Lorna Varn keep the survivors safe?

ANOTHER GIRL, ANOTHER PLANET

As the history of comics in other countries becomes better known here, we can put Fleetway’s collection of Latin American freelancers into greater perspective. To the 2000AD reader, Francisco Solano Lopez is just the artist on one of the Prog’s least successful stories (though nobody – except, as we’ll see, the writer – blamed Death Planet’s inadequacies on him). Take a less insular view, though, and Lopez is something of a catch for the comic, particularly in 2025, when his late 50s co-creation The Eternaut has a deluxe Fantagraphics reissue and an acclaimed Netflix adaptation. His co-creator on The Eternaut juggled writing comics with a day job as a guerilla leader resisting the Argentine junta, and ended up being disappeared. (You wonder what Lopez made of the ‘anti-authoritarian’ themes of 2000AD in the context).

Solano Lopez doesn’t seem to have got much of his Fleetway work from the girls’ comics, and the closest he came to romance was a later bit of lesbian smut for Eros, Young Witches. And yet Death Planet is, unmistakably, a romance comic, or at least involves the triangles and tropes of a romance story, stripped back and refitted into 2000AD format. The set-up makes it obvious: ambitious working woman Lorna Varn is introduced alongside her handsome but somewhat strait-laced colleague Mike. Before long Lorna is thrown into a situation where her professional skills are useless, and she’s brought together with rough diamond Richard Corey. What starts as hatred becomes respect, and the tension between Corey and Varn creates the strip’s drama until fate throws them together – too late! As the two are on the verge of confessing their feelings Corey is eaten by a giant alien bird.

This weird mirror of a romance plot is the closest 2000AD could have come to the topic. Gruesome violence, threatened lynching and forced suicide all got the 2000AD boys hauled over the coals. And yet a single snog between Richard Corey and Lorna Varn would have been more unthinkable than any of those – the gender barrier is the one boundary Tharg would absolutely not push against. It’s years before a 2000AD character has any kind of successful or serious love story, decades before one becomes the actual motor for a series.

As we talked about with The Visible Man, this wasn’t because of any overt misogyny from the creators, who all worked for girls’ comics and in most cases took a lot of pride in the quality of their output. IPC titles like Jinty and Misty could easily incorporate science fiction or horror, and Pat Mills among others spent a lot of time trying to apply some of the successful story techniques from the girls’ titles on 2000AD. But Tharg’s comic existed within a corporate-enforced, highly stratified construct of what boys and girls liked to read which was even less porous on the boys’ side. Once kids left the primary-school innocence of Buttons and Playdays behind they were segregated, and this segregation reached its peak with comics for the 8-12s, where simply to include major women characters in a boys’ comic was a radical proposition.

Action had pushed back against this at times. One of the most endearing elements of football strip Look Out For Lefty was the hero’s girlfriend, Angie, who first appears when Lefty takes the mickey out of her for listening to the Bay City Rollers and bites back at him for his Pink Floyd fandom. She’s a swaggering skinhead girl, in keeping with the strip’s early vibe as a sort of Richard Allen meets Roy Of The Rovers piece. It’s Angie, in fact, who throws a bottle from the stands in the notorious “Kids Rule OK” covered issue that got Action banned – something that surely contributed to the spluttering outrage around it. After the ban, Lefty continued but Angie was put firmly in her place, losing her attitude and her prominence to become a generic football girlfriend type.

In many IPC comics, romance was even rarer. The first issue of Misty, IPC’s big early 1978 launch, has 10 male speaking parts, but no boys aside from a pesky kid brother. They’re almost all authority figures like Dads or teachers, with a couple of mysterious old men. The peers of Misty heroines are girls their own age, all the better to isolate the lead character as her world gets stranger.

The leads of boys’ comics were generally not boys, but they lived in an even more segregated world. 2000AD Prog 50 came out the same week as Misty issue 1. It has five speaking parts for women, half the roles Misty gives to men, and there’s a major difference. All but the most minor – a receptionist in a Walter The Wobot strip – are in some sense adversarial. Frank Hart’s girlfriend reacts to him with horror. A sexy cheerleader in Inferno turns out to be a killer robot. Most threatening is Olga Volskaya, Bill Savage’s Volgan arch-enemy, a gross stereotype of an Eastern European strongwoman, like the weightlifters and shot-putters comedians had fun with for decades.

This selection is typical of early 2000AD, where even the fiercest female characters, like Old One-Eye (the “Hag Bitch”!) were tyrannical mother figures. A woman who could operate on the same level as one of the heroes was extremely rare – only Tanya, the bionic woman in MACH 1, fits the bill, and her fate is an inevitably tragic one.

Tanya’s story was written, like Death Planet, by Alan Hebden, an IPC stalwart in the late 70s and early 80s. Hebden disliked working on other people’s creations, and was also opposed to characters who he felt dragged on after their story had been told, preferences which in the long run made him a better fit for the war and adventure comics like Battle and Eagle and their turnover of shorter-run stories than for 2000AD under Steve MacManus. But he was also writing the well received Mind Wars in Star Lord, a post-Star Wars saga which actually caught some of the drama and grand scope of George Lucas’ epic (and got to the idea of heroic twins first, too). Mind Wars, with its boy and girl co-leads, let Hebden explore another storytelling interest – he was a believer “in equality” and wanted to explore women lead characters. Lorna Varn was a deliberate move towards that.

It only half worked. Hebden put some of the blame on the art, which he said made his tough spacer woman too “girly” in appearance. Though look at the cover of Prog 62, which introduced Varn to the readers, and it’s clear the editors were giving a female lead their best shot. The cover artist, Brian Lewis – who sadly died young at the end of 1978 – had dozens of SF magazine illustrations under his belt: his Lorna Varn has impeccable hair for a woman who’s just crashed on a killer planet but otherwise she fits Hebden’s bill. Varn is gun-toting, practically clothed and no-nonsense. 

Solano Lopez’ art for the series itself doesn’t quite live up to that. You can see Hebden’s point: Lopez has a habit of drawing Varn with a luscious pout and big, heavy-lashed eyes, no matter what peril she’s facing. While it’s hardly Barbarella, his approach makes sense of Hebden’s “girly” critique. But even if Solano Lopez and company had drawn Varn like an early version of Judge Hershey, Death Planet would not be remembered as a feminist classic, and the reason for that is firmly down to the writing.

Like Colony Earth and The Visible Man, it was designed as a short-run series. It could, in theory, have been extended for much longer, with the colonists facing more perils before their final confrontation with the slaver queen who rules the barely hospitable planet. In its collected edition it’s paired with the extremely similar Star Lord story Planet Of The Damned – a rush job, also by Alan Hebden, which strongly suggests that planetary survival stories just aren’t a great idea. But even at just 9 weeks, Death Planet doesn’t feel rushed, and part of the reason is that Lorna Varn actually gets to complete a character arc. It’s just a rather unflattering one.

Varn starts off as an officious jobsworth, whose callousness shocks her junior officer as she matter-of-factly refers to the suspended-animation colonists as “cargo”. When the ship crashes, she goes to pieces, with Cory taking a leadership role, and her attempts to reassert her authority over the group are terrible failures. In the most telling incident, Varn risks her life to rescue a young girl from a fire. Or rather, she wants to risk her life but is wrestled out of the way by Cory who tells her – and is proved correct – that it’s too late and the girl was doomed. By the end, though, Cory’s death – and the death of her slaver rival, who turns out to have been a former colleague of Varn’s – shakes her into a restored confidence, and we’re left with the impression she’ll become a strong leader of the unwilling colony.

This character development is more than almost any other 2000AD lead has had at this point – the Visible Man, a very sui generis strip, is the exception. But it’s character development which leans on a host of chauvinist stereotypes – a woman officer who simply isn’t up to the job when faced with a hostile environment, and whose most ‘feminine’ traits, like compassion and jealousy, almost get her killed. “I feel so – so HELPLESS” she cries, Lopez drawing her as a space ingenue with huge, pleading eyes, and at times – as with the fire sequence, it feels like Hebden is going out of his way to put his heroine in her place. Even in the final confrontation, Varn does almost nothing as Cory sacrifices himself to rid the planet of her enemy. It’s a redemption arc with no actual incident to justify the redemption.

Is this feeble treatment of a female lead a 2000AD problem, or a boys’ comics problem, or something else as well? 2000AD would eventually do better by its women characters than anyone reading Death Planet might suspect, and the failure of this story is partly a symptom of the general flailing around we’ve seen across the first half of 1978. With its strong sweeney-fi identity mostly fallen away, the comic has been running a series of strips in which hoary old B-Movie and pulp templates are adapted with macho man characters. Death Planet takes on the planetary romance – humans exploring a strange, alien environment – but we’ve also had the alien invasion, the freakish scientific experiments, and coming soon the creature feature. 

Only The Visible Man really works, mostly because Mills flips the script and refuses to give us a typical 2000AD hero. The rest of them fall flat, because “SF cliche with rugged action man” is just a retrograde version of SF. And this is what lays Death Planet low too. As soon as Hebden introduces Richard Cory, he takes over the story, because he’s the type of character 2000AD in its early phase is about. It’s Hebden’s choice to give Varn almost no wins against him, but as an adventure story with a strong woman lead character, the strip would be vastly better without him in it at all. (Cory’s prominence means we hardly see the other crew, which makes the point at which one betrays them a dramatic belly-flop).

And yet it’s Cory’s presence that gives Death Planet those strange flickers of a different and more interesting story underneath the survival action. That skeleton of an enemies-to-lovers romance plot is there all through the strip, building week by week until Cory’s final sacrifice. It’s a love that cannot speak its name for fear of grossing the readership out, and I doubt there’s any evidence of Varn/Cory shipping in the early fandom. But it’s in the comic. Death Planet ends up being a story that fails because it’s both too behind and too ahead of its time – a set of dreary macho cliches that’s a tweak or two away from being a truly bold experiment.

HOW TO READ IT: Death Planet is reprinted in the Planet Of The Damned and Death Planet collection from Rebellion. Planet Of The Damned is a Star Lord strip, which I’ll cover when I do Star Lord. Is it better than Death Planet? Stay tuned.

RECOMMENDED? Not really. It’s better plotted than Colony Earth but it’s a missed opportunity to say the least. There’s better from both creators out there.

NEXT PROG: The B-Movie era of 2000AD comes to an end – the ants are on the march in South America, so get ready for a nuanced and sensitive portrayal of the region in Ant Wars.