It should also be noted that "Killer" Kane and Ardala are inventions of the strip. While Nowlan had input, the strip writer is the one who created those two characters.
Yes, but the original "Anthony Rogers" novellas are terrible. They're all plot and worldbuilding (they were published in Hugo Gernsbach's
Amazing Stories, and written in the very Gernsbachian style where going into intricate technical detail about hard-to-pronounce future inventions outweighed any kind of storytelling or characterization). More than that, they're horrifyingly racist -- the sort of genocidal race-war fantasy that was sadly common in the 1920s but these days would only be published in white supremacist fanzines or the darkest corners of the web. I mean, they were so racist even by the standards of their time that they had to dial it back at the end and slap on an unconvincing retcon that "Oh, that entire race that our heroes just nuked and bioweaponed out of existence? Turns out they were part-alien, so it's okay, even though we didn't know that when we annihilated them." So the novellas are best forgotten, dismissed as a failed prototype.
The "real" Buck Rogers -- the character that became iconic, created an entire comics genre, and inspired all the adaptations over the decades -- originated in the comics. The comics gave him the name Buck, changed the focus from Earth to space, dropped the race-war ugliness after no more than a year (and resolved the war far less genocidally), and introduced the entire supporting cast besides Wilma, as well as making Wilma more of an unattainable love interest in the Lois Lane vein (though Wilma came first), whereas the novellas' character married Buck early on.
Inre: the unfair comparison between season two and Star Trek:
It's really only unfair if you assume that Star Trek had the same opinion of women, which, even in the '60s, they obviously did not. As you said, Christopher, the women on Star Trek had a level of agency the women in BR season two could barely see above them. The comparison is superficial at best, and speaks ill of the studio and network execs who came up with it.
But that was exactly what you implied in the comment I was responding to: "A disturbingly large part of the "Let's make it like Star Trek"/dumbing down was the relegation of the women to misogynist servant roles." That implies that the misogyny was an emulation of ST, which it wasn't. Look at people's opinions of ST in the '70s, and I think you'd see that most fans considered it admirably feminist. That seems surprising now, but that's because we've forgotten how much more sexist its contemporary shows (and reality) were. So creators in 1979-80 would not have seen
Star Trek as an old-fashioned or sexist show, but as a progressive, feminist show. So the people trying to "make it like
Star Trek" were the
first-season producers and Gil Gerard, who did a good job giving the show's 25th century the kind of gender and racial equality that Trek only imperfectly attempted to portray. True, Mantley's team were trying to make season 2 like Trek in its starship-based format and (at least in the first two episodes and "The Dorian Secret") its social commentary, but they made no attempt to emulate its relatively forward-looking treatment of women.
Artoo Detoo minus the charm.
That's a valid analogy. Dr. Theopolis and Twiki were conceived as a knockoff of C3PO and R2D2, but in reverse. The original idea was that Twiki would speak
exclusively in "Bidi-bidi" and Theo would translate, which we see to an extent in the pilot movie. But that was really annoying and they dropped it, giving Twiki some English dialogue in the pilot and a lot more (which was still pretty annoying) thereafter.
