Reading Room SPACE MAN "Out Into Space" Part 1

Beginning: a long-lost space epic of a federation of alien worlds, cyborgs, a secret Earth defense force, and flying saucers...

...years before Star Trek, Six Million Dollar Man, or UFO were broadcast over the airwaves!

What...or who...is at the end of the corridor?

Find out...tomorrow!

With a real-life space program well under way, this book-length tale from Dell's Four Color Comics #1253 (1962) was an attempt to "update" the sort of space opera popular with comic and pulp fans of the 1940s-50s like Speed Carter: SpaceMan and Space Squadron by setting it in the near-future instead of 50 or more years later.

Illustrated by Jack Sparling, who used the then-current Mercury astronauts' spacesuit designs, but Chesley Bonestell's already-outdated spacecraft concepts (probably because the finned ships looked cooler than the actual Atlas and Redstone rockets NASA used) as reference.

While the writer/series creator is unknown, he's believed to be Joe Gill who is credited for the later entries in what would turn out to be an eight-issue run.