Writer: Buzz Dixon
Artists: Kevin Altieri and Tom Mandrake
Black Barney and Klaus Yorder have fallen out of a 50-story window. Fortunately, the gravity is low on the Pleasure Planetoid, and they crash on a stage. Barney wins the subsequent fight and makes it back to his ship. They head out to the Trojan asteroids. Klaus Yorder succumbs to the genetic cancer bomb. RAM finds out where Barney is going and sends three cruisers to destroy him.
Barney finds the old Wydlin research base but are attacked by RAM. Barney’s ship fights them, but Barney is about to be destroyed by the cruisers when a mysterious figure exits the research station and fires an atomic missile. This saves Barney but his savior is Klaus Yorder who is miraculously alive after just dying on the Pleasure Planetoid.
“Huer.doc Explains It All”
Writer: Buzz Dixon
Artist: Mark Winchell
Buck is getting a lesson from the Huer.doc program about the twenty-fifth century. He finds out the history since he was in suspended animation. That his victory resulted in a peaceful one world government. That three power blocs arose called Russo-American Mercantile (RAM), The Euro-Bloc and the Indio-Asian Consortium. The Euro-Bloc terraformed the Moon and became a sort of Switzerland in banking. The Indio-Asian Consortium had some success on Venus. RAM terraformed Mars and eventually ending up the most powerful of the blocs. It succeeded in a war that overthrew the Earth government and taking over the planet. We then go over the major players in RAM and the other planets such of Mercury, Venus and the Moon. At the end the Huer.doc was looking for the files on Masterlink and Kharkov in the cybermatrix. He discovered the files were missing.
“Attack in the Asteroids”
Writer: Paul Arden Loberg
Game Design: Mike Pondsmith and Kim Mohan
Counter and gameboard art: Exphero
A game that simulates the battle between Black Barney’s ship the Free Enterprise and three RAM ships. Uses the system designed for the board game.
In this issue we continue the saga of Black Barney trying to find a cure to the genetic time bomb. It takes him to an abandoned research facility and a big battle with RAM. As plenty of humor such as Black Barney taking a slide puppy from the stripper on stage to cover his private parts. Also has the requisite game that you are supposed to cut up the comic to play. Has detailed rules and counters.
The real interest for me is the backup story. A prologue to the upcoming Martian Wars. It gives us a very good explanation of the world that Buck now inhabits. Including a brief history of the various factions and characters. This was very helpful in understanding the world of the twenty-first century.
Comic book cave of awesome 