Heat stifling, progress slow

Still on the first chapter of TPO, deep in the heart of 2000 AD's lengthy gestation during 1976. Here's an extract from what I wrote yesterday:-

Movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno were filling cinemas in the 1970s, featuring Hollywood stars in scenes of apocalyptic peril and providing Mills with the inspiration for another putative strip.

‘Death Bug was a disaster style story – very popular at that time in movies. There was no reason why the format, focussing on a group of identifiable victims, shouldn’t have worked, but it requires more effort from the artist. It would have needed a Joe Colquohoun (the artist on Mills’ classic First World War series Charley’s War in BPW) to make the concept work.

In this case the art was awful, so I didn’t proceed with Death Bug.’ Another outcast was Planet of the Damned, about a portal in the Bermuda Triangle that transported unfortunate travellers to another, barbaric world. That subsequently saw print, in Starlord, a new science fiction launched in 1978, slyly credited to R. E. Wright.

Current wordcount: 4599. Target wordcount: 120,000.