It’s Crime Time! Also it’s the twenty-eighth in our series of Space Spinner 2000 collections! These collections have all of our coverage for a specific character or storyline, all in one place. They’re a great accompaniment to reading collected versions of 2000AD, or to just hear your favorite thrill all in one place.
The Stainless Steel Rat! I’m not sure how Tharg got the idea to adapt some short, fun, sci fi novels into comics, but it very much works! The Stainless Steel Rat is a story of crime and adventure in the far future, starring the smoothest criminal of them all, James Bolivar diGriz. He always has an answer to everything, at least until he gets drafted into the Special Corps and starts having to take down criminals instead of doing crimes himself (kinda, he does do plenty of crimes while taking out criminals). Add in a lovely wife and eventually teenaged sons, plus a dash of time travel and/or political intrigue and you’ve got a perfect stew of thrill power! I read the books when I was a kid, though I only have a slight memory of them. These days I can’t think of reading without imagining diGriz as Ezquerra’s James Coburn look-alike!
https://shop.2000ad.com/catalogue/GRN378
Contact the show at spacespinner2000@gmail.com
Song: Our Man Flint by Jerry Goldsmith
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I’m enjoying the heck out of this episode. listening to you two makes me realize how fun those stories were. Back in the eighties, I was so thoroughly steeped in the novels that I couldn’t stomach the content and tonal changes, which, in retrospect, seems unfair of me.
Yeah, I know we hadn’t reread the novels for the comics, so it’s hard to make the comparison. It’s basically a movie version, you’ve only got like 40 comics pages to get an XXX page novel across so you gotta get the high points!