Another 50 Years Later...

If you were reading along yesterday, today's star of Sunday Morning Funnies will likely come as no great surprise. Please welcome-

As mentioned yesterday, Adam had an ongoing strip in TV Comic from #s 788-835. Americans might have a little difficulty grasping long form story telling in short segments, something we'll see in much greater depth when we get to The Trigan Empire. But in UK comics, it's quite common to have lengthy stories told in one or two page chapters. (Well, maybe American audiences can feel somewhat familiar with getting only one or two pages of story per issue with the recent trend of "decompression" storytelling) At any rate, here's Adam Adamant's final tale in TV Comic. It came out just about the same time as the Adam Adamant annual, so it's a bit hard to be sure where his final story appeared. Of course, i could be entirely wrong and there are still other stories unknown to me waiting to be discovered. This final tale is only five single-page chapters:

Over in his annual, Adam gets the deluxe star treatment. (That means colour) Though dated 1968, it was released December of 1967, just as his run in TV Comic was winding up. As mentioned yesterday, three of the seven stories were presented in comic format. Here's the second of them:

As is often the case with early BBC series, many of the shows were lost to time. Only 16 episodes survive* from a mix of 35mm and 16mm prints. But they have been collected on DVD, and do include the first and last episodes. And so, Adam Adamant Lives on-

pages written by Thomas Woodman, art by Patrick Williams and Selby Donnison from TV Comic #s 831-835 and Adam Adamant Annual (1967)

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*(My information here may be out of date. There has been an active search for missing episodes, and i know that the audio for another one turned up this past year. Chances are good that there are currently more than 16 episodes.)

Nerd Humor**

As TC noted in the comments, the US show mentioned in the previous post was The Second Hundred Years, starring Monte Markham as a Civil War veteran who took off for the Alaskan Gold Rush and was buried in ice & snow in 1900, remaining in hibernation until being revived in 1967.

In the UK, a year earlier Adam Adamant Lives! debuted, starring Gerald Harper as a Victorian Gentleman buried in a collapsed house in 1902, remaining in hibernation until being revived in 1966. Adam Adamant stayed on the air for two years, so the shows overlapped in 1967.

As similar as the shows sound above, they were vastly different from each other.  Luke Carpenter, Monte Markham's character in The Second Hundred Years settles into a quiet life, hiding who he is as he lives with his great-grandson in a typical sitcom view of the generation gap, filtered through Luke's outdated, but not necessarily outmoded, perceptions.
Gerald Harper's Adam Adamant, as one might guess from the logo above, was a bit more wild - groovy, even. The 1960s was merely a new adventure for Adam, and he quickly hooked up with a mod girl for balance and took to solving crimes and odd mysteries. Some say the only reason Adam didn't last much longer is that another, somewhat similarly toned pair took to the airwaves about the same time - The Avengers. Monty Berman & Dennis Spooner had more money for their program, and a spiffier shine on it.
Mind you, it wasn't that the producer of Adam Adamant Lives! didn't have sufficient genre cred - it was Verity Lambert, the original producer of Doctor Who. What else did this woman do? We should probably know.

Amazingly, The Second Hundred Years may be the only television show from the time period that did not get a comic book. (Okay, i'm sure there were others, but it doesn't seem like it when looking at all that was there.)
Adam Adamant Lives! may not have received an ongoing comic, but our hero did get a strip in TV Comics starting in #788 - 2 page chapters for 13 issues, and then another 35 single page episodes. In 1968, he received his own annual-

The book contained seven stories, three of which were in comic format, and another four text stories sporting illustrations such as this one:

I enjoyed The Second Hundred Years when it was run at 4 or 5 am by the local station where i lived at the time. I typically worked until dawn with the television as company while waiting for the computer to render the latest animation frames or effects layers. (It was so nice to bill for machine hours while watching old shows and reading comic books)
But, that said, it kind of sucked by comparison to Adam Adamant Lives!

And, there are those who say that he yet lives...  *

screen caps from respective programs, images from Adam Adamant Annual (1968)

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*(yeah - that's actually Carson Napier. I know.) 

**(Here's an example of how my mind works. The title of the previous post was the Nerd Humor referred to in the this post's subject line: Quantum Broadcast Entanglement? 

You see, classic quantum entanglement experiments use two twinned pairs of particles - AB & BC.

The Second Hundred Years was on ABC.  Adam Adamant Lives was on BBC. ABC + BBC = ABBC, reflecting the entanglement reference linking the similarity of concepts. Nerd Humor.

They all make sense, just rarely get explained)