Overboard (1982) Review

 

Overboard is lazy on every level. 

WRITTEN BY

Ken Armstrong, who appears to be the only writer employed by the Blake's 7 Marvel magazine. Unless he was willing to work for pennies. 

PLOT

Whilst navigating a debris field, Scorpio's outer hull is punctured. Desperate to repair their ship before they run of atmosphere, Avon and Vila take a space walk. A further hit from meteorites results in them being separated from Scorpio, and a rescue attempt mounted... 

ANALYSIS

I can safely say that exactly nothing satisfied me about Overboard. Let's start with the art. The quality of the comic panels has been steadily deteriorating for some time, but at this point, it looks unfinished. Nothing more than a collection of hurried sketches with no sense of time and space. The editing is sloppy, as the text is full of little errors like missing periods and wrong letters. But worst of all is the actual story. 

If you know you're going to have only a few pages to tell a story, pack everything you've got into them! Sacrifice managed to squeeze in a seedy bar scene, a romance, intergalactic aliens, a reunion with Servalan and a near-redemption arc for Avon! We've also had a few action-packed space battles and the amusing double confrontation with the warlord Valkac. But then there's pointless incidental stories like this and Crossed Wires, which are just so... disposable. If I had been a fan back in the day and this was the only new content I got, I'd feel more than a little underwhelmed. 

Furthermore, even the execution of this simple idea is poorly handled. Because of the limited art, it's impossible to tell why Vila is unable to catch his teleport bracelet (yes, I know he's clumsy, but we don't even see how he loses it), or how Avon was able to get his for that matter as Dayna appeared to teleport near Vila, not him. So Vila should've been to one to get his easily. 

CHARACTERS

After the increasingly darker direction Avon has taken in the past few Marvel stories, it's a tonal whiplash to suddenly see him rescue Vila (for selfish reasons of course, but still). I did get a kick out of Vila thinking he was going to burn up in the atmosphere, with his supposed last action in life being to curse Avon's name. That would've been fun to see in an episode. 

NOTES

• This comic was published in the Blake's 7 Marvel Monthly issue 15. 
• Scorpio is in the star system Cryno Callus, which is in Sector 15. Fans can add that to their starmaps. 
• Amusingly, one of the text errors results in Slave shouting "Alert, outer hall penetrated!" and Avon fittingly calling him a bungling machine. 
• The drawing of the Scorpio itself is horrendous. The middle of it is missing, and the backside is twice its normal size. Did it have cosmetic surgery? #NotMyScorpio
• The plot never even bothers to establish why the Scorpio is floating in a debris field (collecting scrap?). 
• Avon claims that the ship was punctured by "rantogen-charged" meteorites which absorbed their radar waves. I will assume he's referring to röntgen.
• One of Dayna's word balloons disappears into the drawing of Tarrant's flight suit. 

BEST QUOTE AVON QUOTE

"It's bad enough losing one crewmembers without the rest behaving like lemmings!"

CONCLUSION

Rubbish.