Camelot 3000!

I didn't participate in the glory of Camelot 3000 when it was first rolling out from DC, but I have had my copy for a very very long time and I fished it out of the stacks for another good reading after a few decades at minimum. 

And I must say I was both impressed and a wee bit taken aback by the contents. 

For a story of this implied depth, it reads very briskly and the events unfold with a staggering velocity. Perhaps I've just gotten used to more modern epics which spend time fondling character and evoking scene, but in this one you get to know some one just in time to see them hit a snag, and the battle against the invasion doesn't really seem to have much of a logic to it in the end. King Arthur has arisen and that gives the people hope and so the enemy is ultimately repelled. 

But I haven't touched on the main attraction of this work and that is the delicious artwork of Brian Bolland who gives us a sleek future world filled with handsome people and gibbering monsters. It's a bright shiny world and if I would make just one suggestion, I'd have added a bit more gloom to some of the sections to make them stand apart. 

Now this comic yarn was produced in the 80's and nowhere does that stand out more than the theme of Sir Tristan who is reincarnated as are many of King Arthur's more famous knights, but in Tristan's case he is revived in the body of a lovely woman. That his old flame Isolde is also brought back and still wants a relationship causes no end of drama. Tristan's sexual confusion, both internally and externally, might have been shocking stuff over forty years ago, but seems fascinating but not outrageous in the modern day. 

Probably the most memorable character is Morgan Le Fay who as delineated by Bolland is a tempting sexpot with only a single flaw, a mass of boils on her back from her many travails in both time and space. But she's a ferocious villain and so is her son, a character who is more thoroughly modern but no less deadly. 

This is a fun and compelling read, but it's easy to see why it hasn't achieved the iconic status of some of the other 80's epics that redefined comic book storytelling, and that's because it really good and not great. Camelot 3000 was the first in many ways, but being first is remarkable but doesn't change critical assessment of the story itself. 

Here are the rest of Bolland's memorable covers. 

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