Very Very Very Vanguards
Before they had most of their properties bought up by DC Comics, Charlton Publications in the early 80s was trying to bolster their brand with a new anthology titled Charlton Bullseye which first started out as a Bronze Age fanzine put out by The CPL Gang during the 70s who also did one of Wally Wood's Heroes Inc. comics. Charlton dug the name so much that they gave it to their latest comics showcase under the same title which featured the publisher's regular heroes of Blue Beetle, Captain Atom, and The Question, even though they left it opened for original characters to get their own shot at fame. One of these was in Issue 4 starring three super space ladies called the Vanguards. This was drawn by future Masters Of The Universe mini-comic artist Larry Houston, but nothing about these way-out wonder women was ever continued after their single-issue appearance. Set in the Alpha star system, the Alphaforce lead by the Vanguards was an alliance formed against tyrants. The Vanguards was made up of Celestria who can command an "electron force", the telekinetic Cerebra, and the firestarter Corona. After defeating the Oscar statue-looking Android 12 who was running a suicide mission for his dead masters, Celestria gets a psychic message from her evil brother Killstar who is leading the surviving villains calling themselves the Overlords which they probably stole for a failed garage band. Killstar unleashes a plague of giant amoeba classified as Spectra-Spores which the Vanguards only have a couple of minutes to stop before they become invulnerable, and just to screw over his sister even more Killstar brings out a stone titan branded an Animate. For some reason, this story was broken up into two parts with the second picking up after the gripping cliffhanger just a page afterwards, possibly done because Charlton considered splitting this over multiple issues. The next chapter has Corona melting the rock monster into lava while Cerebra rushes to activate the special Spectra-Cannon to destroy the still fresh Spectra-Spores just in time. The Overlords still remain to be defeated in a possible future installment, but Celestria is celebrated as being the one savior of the Vangaurds even though the other two members nearly burnt themselves out in order save the planet. Celestria immediately gets crowned queen of the whole dang world despite the fact that she barely did anything in this adventure, and the grateful new queen takes this opportunity to spontaneously propose to some soldier named Ral that she supposedly just met up with. We don't know if Celestria and Ral had any kind of already established relationship prior to this story, or if this was just done in the spur of the moment, but Disney princesses are less easy to woo than Celestria. The Vanguards was an ambitious space opera for the early Me Decade, but it starts up the first Star Wars movie was Episode V with a whole exposition dump of lore that the reader knows nothing about and it doesn't come again for the rest of the story, while the majority of our heroines' adventure is spent with the narrator going for an Oscar trying to keep up with all the crazy things happening within roughly the span of fifteen minutes, and the slapdash ending is pointlessly optimistic as the space baddies are still out there waiting to strike again like Skeletor as part of his daily routine. Celestria, Cerebra, and Corona didn't work very well as an all-female team either considering they beat out characters like the Sailor Scouts and Powerpuff Girls by a few years as these heroines don't operate together, and each one handles their assigned danger on their own with one of the other team members having to pick up where they left off. No "Vanguards Assemble!" here.
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