Review by C.J. Bunce
Think back to what you know of the year 1958 when it comes to science fiction. The world was decades beyond H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. It was three years after Forbidden Planet, seven years past The Thing from Another World, and it was the year of The Blob. It was also five years before Doctor Who and a year before The Twilight Zone. Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, and Robert Heinlein were becoming established voices in science fiction. In the realm of science fiction comics, we were nearly a decade before we’d meet French creators Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières’s Valerian and Laureline. In America it had been two decades since readers first met Flash Gordon and Superman. So in 1958 when Argentine comics creators Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Alberto Breccia came together to create the 11-issue comic Sherlock Time, the world was quite familiar with the genre. But what readers today will notice in the series are very modern stories. These are early mash-ups–science fiction and fantasy, science fiction and horror, science fiction and mysteries, aliens and horror, supernatural and espionage–presented anew for comics readers. In the new hardcover collection Sherlock Time, available for order here at Amazon, Fantagraphics presents a collection of Oesterheld and Breccia stories that set the stage for The X-Files, Doctor Who, and The Twilight Zone.
Without color, without sound, these stories feel like you’re trapped with Number Six inside The Prisoner, or maybe you’re holding Rod Serling’s hand as he guides you through The Twilight Zone. Breccia’s clean and shadowy art style reminds me of Mike Grell’s layouts in the 1970s and 1980s. Retiree Julio Luna buys a mansion that he snatches up for a song, all before learning that it may be cursed or haunted. Luna is being watched, and that watcher says his name is Sherlock Time. The mansion contains a portal-ship, which, like the TARDIS of sci-fi’s future, allows its occupants to travel far away. But like the Weeping Angels in the Doctor Who episode “Blink,” it can cause a person to disappear, too. In this case it means kidnapping people for study by advanced civilizations on another planet. The Doctor of this story looks his era–he’s a boxy, Dick Tracy-styled, stockily built man, often wielding a cigar or pipe.
In one story a man is haunted by an ugly idol that convinces him to buy it at any price, only to then throw it away. What secret power does the idol hold? In another tale a planet lures space travelers to their deaths. Luna is like Sherlock Holmes’s comrade Watson in that he challenges Sherlock and assists in each issue’s mystery. And he’s like a companion to Sherlock Time’s Doctor a la Doctor Who. In one scene you’ll see a shocking alien outside the window of Sherlock’s space craft, recalling William Shatner in The Twilight Zone. Other stories create slowly built, pulse-pounding thrills not unlike stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Stephen King.
A man is spirited away to a planet for gladiator sport against a robot. And a cable car ride may have no destination.
In a three-part story, Sherlock solves the perfect crime, and another is a spy/espionage story. The best of them all is probably the story “Three Eyes,” which has beats and vibes of The Thing from Another World. The final tale is about a hero, that foretells an Adam Warlock or Green Lantern-styled hero to come.
Sherlock Time is a progenitor of The X-Files, a moody exploration of the boundaries of science fiction in comics format. These stories originally ran concurrently with Oesterheld’s comics serial The Eternaut, and laid the groundwork for Oesterheld and Breccia’s Mort Cinder. Add this new hardcover collection to your pull list at Elite Comics or your local comic shop. Or order Sherlock Time now here at Amazon available today for the first time.
