Review: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century Volume 1

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century: The Complete Dailies Vol 1: 1929-1930
Written by John Dille and Phillip Nowlan, art by Richard Calkins
Hermes Press
320 pgs+, B&W, HC, $39.99
ISBN 1932563199

There are a number of critical filters through which one can appraise Buck Rogers in the 25th Century including influence, craft, deviation from contemporary norms in comic strips, deviations from modern cultural norms, the value of book as an object and, finally, whatever intrinsic entertainment value it might offer. A given reader’s enjoyment of this collection will be dictated with how they might prioritize the various criteria listed above. In the bipartisan spirit of the age, let’s start with its more flattering qualities and work our way down.

Man, this is one nice looking and sturdy book. The reproduction quality is top-notch and represents, to modern collectors offered a wide-variety of strips in a variety of formats, an excellent value at nearly 320 pages in this hardcover edition. Ron Goulart’s introduction traces the timeline of the Buck Rogers phenomena without asserting more superlatives than the series can support. Transitioning quickly from pulp to strip, Buck Rogers benefits greatly from the direct involvement of its primary creator writer Phillip Nowlan. One must admire the brevity with which Nowlan navigates the back-story (literally two and half panels in the opening strip) before plunging his titular hero into the action. Artist Richard “Lt. Dick” Calkins proves to be an interesting if not always slick foil to Rowlan’s imaginative proto-science-fiction. Not yet informed (and some might say fettered) by the homogenizing tendencies that cinema and then television would have on science=fiction, Calkins’ drawings have an infectious, outsider quality to their design, stylishly rendered with a diverse palette of pen and zip-a-tone effects.

Launched from a novel platform of exploring America 500 years into the future, Buck Rogers doesn’t develop themes so much as it moseys from idea to idea. Rowlan shows some uncertainty in his command over the emerging sci-fi genre as the story meanders across the tropes of American Western and other, more broadly themed adventure serials. It isn’t until Buck and his crew are forced into outer space in response to an alien abduction that the strip can be considered unapologetically science-fiction as opposed to a xenophobic dystopia fed by fears of Asian aggression.

If this volume is indicative of the series as a whole, then Buck Rogers’ greatest shortcoming is in its lack of narrative ambition. Rowlan’s criticisms of the future would seem to be limited to the ways that it fails to live up to life in 1929. Given the degree of casual racism and emotionally stunted relations between the sexes that Rowlan’s worldview unselfconsciously exhibits, it hardly adds up to a rallying cry for the perpetuation of the species. It would be left to a generation of writers after Nowlan’s to discover science-fiction’s transcendent quality of social criticism and, as a result, Buck Rogers rarely rises above the intrinsic enjoyment it offers through its awkwardly staged but endlessly imaginative exploration of what was truly a new frontier.