It's not over yet! Department S still had one more case to solve... just not on television. Their last adventure, 'The Silent Men', played out as a comic strip in the pages of the 1971 Thunderbirds annual.
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| It at least got Stewart's Vauxhall right. |
If that seems weird, then yes, it actually is. Other than both being ITC productions, the two shows have little in common; about the only less-appropriate match for a cheerily optimistic children's show about puppets in supermachines rescuing people from hubristic disasters would have been The Prisoner. Also strange is just how little of the annual actually features Thunderbirds, with Joe 90, Captain Scarlet and something called Secret Agent 21 sharing the pages along with the usual unfunny cartoons and vaguely educational filler about jets and tall buildings that characterised TV spin-off annuals of the era. A theory I've seen online is that the strips were commissioned for a weekly ITC/Century 21 comic that never got beyond the dummy stage and were used because they'd already been paid for, but that doesn't seem wholly plausible as weekly comics of that kind rarely had stories of more than a couple of pages long, at least that I can remember.
Anyway, whatever the reasoning behind it, 'The Silent Men' is as far as I'm aware the only ancillary media that Department S ever received. (Even Jason King got a couple of tie-in novels.) So it's interesting, to me at least, in that respect alone. How does it fare compared to the series it represents?
The first thing to notice is that, well... it's not very good. Obviously a six-page comic strip in a book aimed at kids isn't likely to produce anything groundbreaking or thought-provoking, but in this case it's hard to believe that the (uncredited) writer had ever actually watched an episode of the show he was adapting. Here, the team aren't detectives but spies, called to Istanbul to oversee the defection of two Eastern Bloc scientists. Maybe the writer thought that was what the 'S' in the title stood for.
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| "Thank you for explaining that thing I already know, Basil Exposition!" |
Then we get to the treatment of Annabelle. She's been demoted to the role of secretary - which had all but happened by the end of the series, but this makes it official - and actually seems happy about it! She's also referred to in a caption as "the girl", which is something that always raises my hackles. I suppose I should be thankful that she wasn't shown fetching drinks and cigars for the menfolk. A twist in the story reveals that Fake Annabelle (I refuse to accept that she's the real one - as proof, she submissively calls Jason "Mr King") had been staring at wax dummies rather than the real scientists for the whole evening, so she's actually worse than useless.
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| No, no, no. Stewart wears a brown suit. |
The artwork isn't great, either. It's competent but uninspired, which could be ITC's motto most of the time, but it almost feels like whoever drew it did so from a single publicity picture of the main cast, and when trying to show them from other angles just took a wild guess. Jason looks nothing like the lean, aquiline Peter Wyngarde, being broad-jawed and pug-nosed, while Stewart gets a bland, generic representation that could just as easily be Martin Landau or Robert Vaughn. Annabelle, meanwhile, gets a face straight out of the 'women in six easy steps' section of How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way with a beehive hairdo on top. There's only a single panel where Jason seems to have been drawn from a reference photo, and the other two don't even get that honour.
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| With special guest star, Leonard Nimoy! |
The story itself is all rather silly. Enemy agents kidnap the defectors and replace them with the aforementioned wax dummies, somehow without anyone noticing. A dead guard managed to scrawl a clue before he expired, so Jason deduces how the villains are transporting their captives. One quick helicopter procurement later and he and Stewart are performing stunts straight out of a Fast & Furious movie to get aboard a truck before biffing the Sean Connery-lookalike driver and rescuing the scientists. Cue a nonsensical joke that Jason ought to stick to writing novels because the truth is stranger than his fiction (eh?), the end.
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| "Oops," said Jason as he also snapped the neck of the man inside. |
So as I said earlier, it's not very good, and in terms of setup and characterisation (it's hard to imagine Jason ever calling anyone "old bean", as if he's turned into Terry Thomas) it's nothing like the show it purports to represent. Yet oddly, the bizarre gimmick of the story - transporting kidnap victims undetected inside mannequins - is something I can actually imagine happening on Department S! It's got just the right amount of Avengers-style strangeness, and the show's better writers could probably have had a lot of fun with it. Plus it would have given them another chance to do a pre-credits freeze frame of a wax dummy, which we already know was a favourite of theirs.
And at least it was more exciting and entertaining than 'A Fish Out Of Water'.
