Last month Stingray Comic Anthology Volume 1: Tales from the Depths rose to the surface – the first volume of an exhaustive new collection from Anderson Entertainment that complies all the original TV21 comic strips for Stingray, the classic 1960s undersea adventure series. Released as part of a year-long celebration of Stingray’s 60th anniversary, Tales from the Depths also includes a bunch of all-new stories tying into Stingray: Deadly Uprising – a multimedia crossover event that features new novels, non-fiction books and mini-episodes.
My contribution is “The Undefeated”, a six-page story scripted by me, with art from the incomparable Matt Brooker (aka D’Israeli), who has worked on such big comics names as Tank Girl, Judge Dredd and Batman.
As with my previous comics projects, I’m posting an “author commentary” piece here to highlight and annotate some of the concepts that appear in this story.
Spoiler Warning! These notes give away story points from “The Undefeated” and other stories in the Stingray: Deadly Uprising series event!
“The Undefeated” is a direct sequel to the events of the Stingray TV episode “The Big Gun”, in which the Solarstar people deploy their Missile Ejector craft and super-destructive missiles against the surface world.
Matt Brooker does a great job with the art, expanding the world of the Solarstars (which was pretty much just a garden and a fancy lawn chair on television) into a society on the brink of destruction!
In “The Big Gun”, the Mighty Leader, his lackey Korda and ill-fated submarine pilot Maritimus are the only Solarstars seen; I added the new character of Abura, a female Solarstar who serves as the Leader’s ‘Battle Commander’; her facial scar and medals suggest she’s a veteran of the conflict between her people and their old enemies, the Titanicans. There’s a tradition of Stingray characters having names related to the seas or nearby locations – so Abura’s name (spell it backwards!) comes from an island country in the Caribbean.
This strip introduces King Titan’s “Super Terror Fish”, a larger version of the “Mechanical Fish” craft used by the Titanicans on the TV show: Matt followed my request to the tee, as the script asks for something that looks like a standard Terror Fish sub “only bigger and meaner!”
King Titan is joined on his mission by Illium, an Atlantean seen in the TV episode “The Invaders”.
The flashback panel (see above) showing the war between the Solarstar and the Titanicans gave me the opportunity to shore up the motives for the attacks on the surface world in “The Big Gun”, which are never really explained in the TV story.
The Mighty Leader recalls the closing events of “The Big Gun”, when Captain Troy Tempest and sonar operator ‘Phones’ Sheridan, the crew of the titular atomic submarine, destroy his agent Maritimus and attack Starfish City in retaliation – but as things are seen from his point of view, the Stingray crew are cast as over-the-top villains!
Finally, the events set in motion here play out in my next story “Triple-Cross”, appearing in Stingray Comic Anthology Volume 2: Battle Lines.
For more details about Stingray: Deadly Uprising, visit the official Anderson website at this link – and to order your copy of Stingray Comic Anthology Volume 1: Tales from the Depths, click here!
