It's like a hundred degrees out, but I still went for a little bike ride for a fair-sized fistful of comics, including another Quality reprint: from 1988,
Scavengers #7, reprinting a good chunk of John Wagner and Pat Mills'
Shako: the Only Bear on the C.I.A. Death List! (Art not credited here, but was probably Ramon Sola, Juan Arancio, Dodderio, and/or Lopez Vera.)
Mighty polar bear Shako had swallowed a top secret capsule, and while the CIA has been after it, today the KGB gets in on the action: they capture Shako, and don't want to kill him without contacting Moscow first, since they weren't sure why the Americans had seemingly declared war on a bear. However, there's always one guy, who thinks "I could totally take that bear," and vodka may be involved; so Shako gets out of his cage on the same page...look,
2000 AD progs don't have time or pages to dick about, try to keep up! Shako makes a rather leisurely escape from the Russians, since it was a whaling boat, and mmm, blubber! He gets knocked out by a bullet creasing his skull; just like a noir private detective or the Warlord; just in time for an American helicopter to grab him, but the Russians shoot the copter down, dumping Shako into the ocean.
Shako's Ahab, CIA chief Falmuth, is furious over losing the bear; he had already lost an arm and wasn't about to lose his job as well. When a massive walrus corpse is spotted, they figure Shako will be back for it later, and Falmuth orders one of his men to wait inside the walrus! That goes about as well as you'd figure; but Falmuth would get his shortly. Then, a final battle with ecologist Buck Dollar and the injured Shako, which ends...too tragically for me to go into. Man, I wish
Shako had run for like 200 issues, getting his revenge on the world. His body count was like ten in just this issue; not counting the walrus.
4 comments:
Shako walked so that Cocaine Bear could run...
Also how has the Buck Dollar name not already been used as a cheesy 70's/80's porn name?
Shako's actually shown up in a bunch of specials/crossovers in the last 5-10 years, well before anyone knew what a Cocaine Bear even was. He's definitely a fan favorite, and it doesn't hurt that Jock did the cover for the collected edition they put out a couple of years before he started showing up again. There were plenty of other 'man vs. nature, and nature wins' stories around the same time (Scavengers is mostly devoted to those sort of stories), but something about Shako kept his memory alive all those years.
I don't have all of SCAVENGERS, but aside from "The Helltrekkers," most of the serials seem to end with the threat, and the heroes, blown up. "It's a tie!"
Not sure how many they got to but the way most of these stories went was Nature: 30+, Man: 2 or 3 (if they got lucky), so the people basically say, "I don't want to play anymore" and leave. Sorta counts as a tie, if 'you can't lose if you don't finish the game' applies.
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