Seeing the Attraction

I was cruising through a few old copies of Countdown comic the other day and amidst the TV21 reprint material and other stuff, there are one or two original stories and one offs by various jobbing artists, including one of my personal favourites, Brian Lewis. His style is quite technical and detailed, whilst at the same time individual and stylish.

A particularly good story I fondly remembered from back in 1971 is the stand alone 'Space Tug' strip. This featured a small group of spacefarers who ran a salvage ship for hire, called unsurprisingly the Space Tug. Lewis took his inspiration clearly from the craft and styling of 2001 a Space Odyssey, especially the Lunar Shuttle Aries and the distinctive space suits. Countdown had blatantly lifted the Discovery for its flagship strip and used it extensively with only a name change, but Lewis created ships and environments which could have easily been 'off camera' in Kubricks opus.

ARIES LUNAR SHUTTLE

Heres a pastiche of the ships and craft from the strip. The other big attraction for me was they all had a nice Spacex feel to them with strange, globular engines and unusual shapes.