Four Black Holes?

In an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars in the late 1970s, Walt Disney Pictures (who had yet to buy the Star Wars IP) released their big space epic: The Black Hole. They threw a ton of money at the movie, hiring some big name actors and pulling in more special effects than Disney had ever put in a single movie. The problem, though, was in the script. The first half/two-thirds of the movie is dreadfully tedious and talks superficially about the philosophical and existential meaning of life and mankind, the last part of the movie is an action/adventure, and there's a bit in the middle that's an absolute farce of the whole sci-fi genre where robots play video games. It'd be like you take the first half of 2001: A Space Odyssey up through when HAL is decommissioned, but then finish the movie with the Death Star trench run. And you used the 1990s Robocop Saturday morning cartoon to transition between the two parts. To no great surprise, the movie flopped.

But, Disney did have it's marketing machine going full force. There were coloring books and action figures and all sorts of tie-ins. Including comic books! But interestingly, there are four different Black Hole comics directly from the movie. Sort of.

The first I'll mention is Walt Disney Showcase #54 (January 1980). This was a 48 page adaptation of the movie from Western/Gold Key with art by Dan Spiegle. (No formal credits are given in the issue. Mary Carey is generally credited with the script here.) Despite using a photographic cover, the characters Spiegle draws here bear little physical resemblance to the actors, presumably because of a rights issue.

The story was then split in two parts and released as Walt Disney The Black Hole #1 and #2 a few months later. Third and fourth issues were added to continue the characters' adventures after having gone through the black hole as depicted at the end of the movie. Another photo cover was used for #3 and a very Lost in Space style painting by Chuck Liese was used for #4. The new stories were written by Michael Teitelbaum and were drawn by Al McWilliams (#3) and Dan Spiegle (#4).

Now, there's also magazine-sized paperback adaption from Golden Press that came out in 1979 simply titled The Black Hole. It uses another photo cover. Interestingly, the Grand Comics Database explicitly mentions "This is NOT a reprint of Walt Disney Showcase #54" but they also credit Mary Carey and Dan Spiegle as the creators for both, and list the page count as identical to Walt Disney Showcase #54. Over at the Mars Will Send No More blog, Matthew notes they are indeed the same. I have been unable to confirm this one way or another for myself.

Finally, Disney also got Jack Kirby to do a weekly newspaper strip adaptation of the movie in 1979. Not surprisingly, he focused a little more on the action aspects of the story, but few newspapers actually picked it up, so almost no one saw it. Certainly almost no one saw it in its entirety. I understand that it's been at least partially reprinted in Walt Disney's Treasury of Classic Tales and with new digital coloring in Disney Adventures Comic Zone. The Classic Tales version took Kirby's original newspaper layout and re-cut them all to fit a standard comic page; there's some odd gutter spacing and I believe some of the panels have been cut entirely. But it follows most of what Kirby put together. Below I have some scans of the Classic Tales version that I've been able to find online from multiple sources. (One of the pages is in French, but it's not hard to get the gist of things just from the context.) I'm certainly not eager for a complete collection of this story -- I rewatched the movie a few months ago; it was awful on several levels -- but it does make for an interesting curiosity in comics history.

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