ISSUE
ONE: BEAST KILLER
Edited, written and drawn by Jack Kirby; Inked and lettered by Mike Royer; Colored by G. Roussos; Consulting editor Archie Goodwin.
This basically serves as a broken down
retelling of the Clarke/Kubrick story, with some embellishments and alterations.
The story opens as He Who Hunts Alonethe sole audience of the Stone
Spirit that talks to his mindlives up to his name with a wooden club.
The monolith not only gave HWHA (Hoohaa?) the knowledge of hunting with a
weapon, but has made him fiercely independent and self-centered.
He hates the others of his tribe; the Stone Spirit, it seems, only
reaches him. The others cant
hear it. When others of his tribe
try to break in on HWHAs assault on a Procamelus, HWHA fights them off with
mighty bellows and swinging club, losing the animal as it darts for the forest.
The wooden club, HWHA realizes, is
insufficient for a quick kill. He
goes back to his cave as the tribal hunters secretly follow.
There, they witness their unfriendly fellows discussion with the
stone spirita mysterious slab of mystical granite that inspires HWHA to
create the first spear, a powerful weapon that causes his tribesmen to christen
him Beast Killer.
Here, Kirby pays tribute to the films
famous bone/space ship edit; as Beast Killer throws his spear in one panel, the
very next panel shows us astronaut Woodrow DeckerBeast Killers direct
descendantthrowing an alien artifact screaming This thing is useless!!
USELESS!!
In the year 2001, Decker and fellow space
explorer Mason have crashed on an asteroid in their search for extraterrestrial
life. Ironically, they have made
that momentous discovery at the cost of their own lives; while Mason remains
confident that mission control will send help, Decker is certain that they will
die, their incredible discovery useless to them.
Decker dejectedly follows Mason into the
dilapidated remains of an ancient ET structure, where Mason is attacked and
killed by an alien creature living in its bowels.
As Masons body is dragged into the creatures pit, the structure and
entire asteroid begin to crumble around Decker.
He flees, jumping directly into a waiting monolith that transports him,
without memory, to an idyllic country scene where he meets Bill, a
straw-chewing country boy who begins to lead Decker up a country road to a house
Decker will never see because with each step he is aging rapidly until he
finally dies and is reborn as a Star Child, or New Seed, as Kirby refers to it.