Everyone looking forward to Marvel's 'The Heroic Age' - a culmination of five years of story arcs.  Hang on - FIVE YEARS!  Isn't this one of the main things wrong with comic books these days?  Sure, there were various different story arcs to jump on to at one or the other but even then...sometimes, you're talking about a two-year story arc.  If you hadn't bought the issue in the beginning, then who on Earth is going to jump in, say, six or nine months in and stay with the title.  Remember the classic Defenders v Avengers War, that was basically all over in 3 issues!

And DC are just as guilty of course.  Pick up an average Superman or Batman comic over the past year or so and you'll find one missing ingredient - Superman or Batman.  Now, I'm not one of those who gives out the perennial sigh of why aren't comics for kids anymore.  We've grown up with them and they've grown up with us.  What I'm getting at is, floppies should actually be good reads on their own.  Not just fillers for the trade paperback.

One of my favourite pieces of sci-fi tv is Space: 1999.  If you've never heard of it, then it was on television in the 1970s and concerns the crew of Moonbase Alpha -  a research station on Earth's moon.  A chain reaction and massive explosion sends the Moon hurtling out of Earth's orbit.  From then on, the crew attempt to initially try to find a way of returning to Earth before, eventually, just attempting to find a planet they can settle on that won't do them too much harm.

The first series really deserves to be celebrated far more than it is.  The plots were intelligent, mysterious, occasionally more action-packed, occasionally more cerebral but of the highest quality.  Commander John Koenig (Martin Landau) was intense.  You never got the idea that he was a military general - just a leader of a research outpost under a lot of strain.  Victor Bergman (Barry Morse) is a thoroughly likeable character, with a believable persona.  He was written out of the second series - one of the main reasons why it was so poor in comparison.  Anyway, I liked it so much I've written a little piece of fanfiction, where the team come across a vast abandoned array in deep space.  But will this lead to their salvation or their doom?

Oh, and just to point out, there's now a page for Submissions, for any budding artists or writers out there.