Publication date: June, 1989
Story: Peter Laird and Michael Dooney
Art: Mchael Dooney
Lettering: Steve Lavigne
Summary:
Travelling a space highway in their thinking ship, ‘Soto,
Gizmo Sprocket and Fluffy Brockelton figure they’ve got it made. Responding to an ad for the Federation Army
Reserve Corps, they’ll each pick up a huge check for just five weeks of service
on a "tropical paradise". Gizmo figures it’ll
give him time to work on his writing career, while Fluffy’s experience in the
military leaves him confident the gig will be a cakewalk.
Four and a half weeks into their tour on the festering
jungle planet, the two are utterly miserable and run ragged. Gizmo remarks that if the Federats hadn’t
impounded ‘Soto when they signed up, they’d have gone AWOL weeks ago. Suddenly, a gargantuan reptile bursts out of
the trees and attacks the platoon. It
slaughters all the soldiers save Gizmo and Fluffy, who inconveniently run out
of ammo. The two make a break for it and
after some distance, they lose the monster.
Trudging through the jungle, they find the overgrown
remains of a SAL-400 worker droid. Gizmo
suspects that it’s been lying inactive for years, but for the most part looks
intact. Figuring it might help them find
their way back to base, Gizmo does some rewiring to get the droid online. Eventually, the droid activates, but turns
out to be no mere droid: He’s Professor Honeycutt, alias the Fugitoid. The Fugitoid explains his situation…
He used to be a scientist working for the Federats and
General Blanque, but after an accident involving his menta-wave helmet, his
mind was transferred into the body of his SAL droid. Wanting the secrets to his transmat device
for insidious purposes, Blanque dubbed Honeycutt a “Fugitoid” and sent his
armies to capture him. In his travels,
he wound up being chased by both the Federats and the Triceratons. Eventually, the Fugitoid decided to settle
down on a planet with no intelligent life and that neither faction would find
worth colonizing. After stowing away on
a garbage scow, he escaped to this “dump planet” and hoped to live a life of
peace. However, when his batteries wound
down, he depowered and was apparently inactive for years.
When Gizmo tells him that the Federats have setup a base
on the planet, the Fugitoid realizes he must escape at once. Gizmo and Fluffy promise to help him and,
following the flight paths of troop carriers and shuttles overhead, they spend
the next four days headed toward the vehicle impound base.
Arriving, the three disguise themselves as LURPS
(long-range recon patrollers) and bluff their way past the guards. They then find the lot where ‘Soto is
impounded and Gizmo uses his mental bond with the living ship wake him up (so he can knock a guard out with his driver’s side door). They then remove the boot with the guard’s
key and take off.
They decide to take cover behind a moon until their next
course has been calculated. However,
before they can take off, they’re caught in a tractor beam. Much to the Fugitoid’s horror, the beam is
drawing them toward a Triceraton asteroid ship…
Fluffy Facts:
*The story concludes in Gizmo and the Fugitoid #2.
*Gizmo last appeared in the story “King for a Day”,
published in The Collected Gizmo.
Fluffy’s history in the military can be seen in the stories “Peace on
the Line” and “Monuments”.
*Professor Honeycutt recaps the events which led to his
becoming the Fugitoid, which occurred in Fugitoid (microseries) #1. Oddly, no mention is made of the Turtles and
the framing of the recap makes it appear as though the events of the micro just
recently happened.
*The Gizmo comics take place in the future, sometime
after TMNT Volume 4. The Fugitoid was
shown to still be wanted by the Federation as recently as Tales of the TMNT (Vol. 2) #54.
*On page 5, the photos behind the driver’s seat of ‘Soto
are of characters from the Jim Lawson/Mirage series Bade Biker and Orson.
Review:
The continuing adventures of the Fugitoid! Obviously, Eastman and Laird had wanted to do
more with him after the initial outer space arc in TMNT Volume 1, but the
little guy didn’t really have enough pep to carry his own ongoing or limited
series. So as they had with the Ninja
Turtles, they elected to team him up again with an existing Mirage title:
Gizmo.
According to the intro, Eastman and Laird had already
mapped out the Fugitoid’s continuing storyline beyond his last appearance in
TMNT (Vol. 1) #7, with Dooney’s characters being worked into the existing
tapestry. The result, though, is kind of
weird on a chronological level. There is
no mention of the Turtles or how the Fugitoid became separated from the Utroms
after his last appearance (where he went to go live in peace on their
homeworld). The recap he provides omits
those adventures and goes straight from the events of the original Fugitoid
microseries into the misadventure that led to his spending years inactive on a
dump world.
I think they were trying to play fast and loose with
continuity so as not to alienate new readers with a deluge of back story. Keep in mind that in 1989, this was the first
time the Fugitoid had been used since TMNT #7 (well, excluding the short tale “Terror by Transmat”). In this story, the
Fugitoid is deactivated for years, sort of allowing him to hibernate away the
decades until his storyline catches up with Gizmo’s (whose adventures take
place in the future). Obviously, this
extended hibernation period would get contradicted by TMNT Volume 4 and Tales
of the TMNT Volume 2 stories, which show that the Fugitoid spent his missing
time hanging out on the Utrom Homeworld, where we last saw him.
I’d recommend not thinking about it too hard (though
clearly I already have). Let’s just say
that at some point between TMNT Volume 4 and Gizmo and the Fugitoid, Honeycutt
got separated from the Utroms, escaped to the dump world and was deactivated
for a few years until Gizmo and Fluffy found him. Why he didn’t mention any of his adventures
between his microseries and now, well, maybe he was just trying to be brisk with his life story.
Anyway, you really shouldn’t let all that silly
continuity stuff bother you, because this is actually a fun and lavish-looking
two-parter. The story is very bare
bones, but it’s more a means to convey Dooney’s glorious art, and he may
be at his absolute career best with these issues. There are a number of splash pages and
two-page spreads that are simply eye-poppingly beautiful and he never spares
the detail no matter how small his panels have to get to convey the story. The jungle is lush and damp, the monsters are
scaly and bizarre, the space vehicles are this zany mix of Buck Rogers retro
and Star Wars contemporary, and the robots are all shiny as hell. I mean, look at the Fugitoid on the bottom
left of page 23; you can see the palm trees subtly reflected in his back and
warped at a sideways angle. It’s the
little things like that.
Gizmo and the Fugitoid is more character-driven than it
is story-driven, so the plot isn’t especially complex. What really draws you in is the relationships
shared by the cast and the friendly jabs they take at each other. There’s a great balance between their
strengths and foibles, a quality ported over from the Gizmo ongoing series, and
no one feels more useful or useless than anyone else. Fluffy’s a tough guy with a career military
history, but he’s badly out of shape. Gizmo’s
a clever guy with a certain technical aptitude, but he’s got delusions of
grandeur and is always looking for the easy way. And the Fugitoid is of course a genius, but
he’s also a trouble-magnet.
There’s a great dynamic going on and everybody is allotted
their fair share of opportunities to both screw up and save the day. It’s this sort of balance I appreciate in ensemble
stories more than anything else, as there’s nothing worse than characters who are a designated “comedy relief fuckup” or "infallible god that can do no
wrong".
Not much else to say.
While the story isn’t the most engaging, the gorgeous art and colorful
characters certainly are, and they ought to draw you into the tale. And at any rate, it’s fun to see a spinoff
story starring one of the TMNT’s recurring characters and their adventures away
from the main title.
Grade: B+ (as in, “Boy, I wish I had a bigger scanner so
I could show you all the beautiful two-page spreads and also that I wasn’t too
lazy to bother syncing the page scans together in photoshop”.)
