Liana
      While the series was titled Meltdown Man a more accurate title might have
been Ground Zero Man.  On assignment in the Middle East SAS Sergeant Nick
Stone had intercepted a nuclear weapon in terrorists hands only to discover
it had been activated and would detonate in seconds,  Realizing he had no
chance of escape or disarming the weapon Stone had accepted his end
philosophically.  Except it turns out that if you're at absolute ground zero
when a bomb goes off rather than being vapourised you're blasted through a
rift in the space-time continuum.  Stone found himself in a strange new world
when anthromorphic animals had been bioengineered from ancestral forms he
recognised to serve their human masters.  While many of the Yujees (Eugenic
Bioforms) accepted their lot there were those among them who dreamed of
equality but needed a leader and weapons that could resist the human's "Snip"
guns and their armies of predators.  He had just arrived
     Disgusted by the slavery of the yujees quickly made an enemy of Leeshar,
an ambitious megalomanic who intended himself supreme ruler of the humans and
keep the yujees in their place.  Seeing Stone as an obstacle Leeshar set out
to destroy him but his "guest" Stone escaped with the help of a catgirl named
Liana.
     Liana was part of the small yujee resistance and was hoping Stone could
convince her fellow yujees they had a chance.  Stone did more than that having
discovered that while snip guns could only be used by humans and were able to
slice through anything (by cutting molecular bonds) their range was very
limited.  He also learner that projectile weapons were limited to bows and
arrows which gave him an idea.  Using the yujee metalsmiths of Anville he
recreated the AK 47 Kalashnikov giving the yujees weapons that if not as
devasting as the humans' were more effective at a distance.  In theory anyway,
the next problem was distributing them.  Sending his companions T-Bone, a
bull-man and Gruff, a wolf-man to contact their people Stone and Liana headed
off to do what they could to stir up resitance.  Gruff made contact with his
old brigand buddies only to discover that Pole-Axe, a polar bear, had taken
over from the leader he had known.  Gruff wasn't sure about trusting him but
beggars can't be choosers.  Or so he thought consciously but his subconscious
came up with this dream as a warning.


     Gruff awoke to find two of Pole-Axe's men planning to to kill him while
Pole-Axe took his band to Anville to seize the guns and carve out his own
empire.  Gruff escaped but while Pole-Axe was enroute to Anville he ran across
Liana who had been separated from Stone.  Which gave him and idea for how to
kill a little fun.  You'll note Liana looks quite different from the first
picture.  While she originally looked a lot more feline after a bad bout of
meta(bolic) plague she became a more human looking blonde and was even able to
pass as human to predators with a poor sense of smell.  Anyway back to Liana's
first run-in with Pole-Axe.
 



     At which point Pole-Axe noticed Stone's snipgun was out of juice and
Stone had to kick him into the bonfire to get away.  A little scorched but
not discouraged Pole-Axe headed for Anville only to find Stone had been busy
training the yujees to use their AK-47s.  With his brigands wiped out Pole-Axe
fled but ran across an unconscious Liana.  Liana had been knocked out when a
damaged building collapsed on top of her during the fighting.  Having learned
Stone cared about her and figuring she'd make a useful bargaining chip
Pole-Axe dragged her off to Leeshar's headquarters




     The big secret turned out to be that Leeshar had created a race of
superpredators both to crush Stone and to enable him to take over the
Earth.  The other big secret of the series turned out to be that what Stone
had believed to be another world (as the sun rose in the west and set in
the east) was Earth of the far future having been struck by a massive
asteroid millenia earlier so the spin was reversed.  To make a long story
short Stone ended the war by tricking Leeshar into detonating a nuke in his
heaquarters.  This threw both Stone and Leeshar into the twentieth century
when Leeshar faded out of existence leaving Stone to wonder if his warning
about the asteroid would be believed so it might be stopped before impact (an
idea that's been used several times since this story was published in 1981)
in which case Leeshar, Liana and everyone else he had met would never exist
as a different future would occur.  Leaving Stone with a tough decision to
make as the series ended.  As to if any of the events of Meltdown Man
actually happened I'll fall back on Alan Moore's line from the last issue of
the pre-revisionist Superman.
     "This is an imaginary story.  Aren't they all?"









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