Saturday, July 18, 2015

Reading Room: SPACE PATROL "Gambling Den of Space"

Here's a tale featuring an evil Plutonian who runs a mobile gambling den...
...from a short-lived series about a pair of interstellar cops in Centaur's Amazing Mystery Funnies!
(Does Kodi look like a prototype for Star Trek: the Next Generation's Ferengi?)
The multi-talented Basil Wolverton wrote, illustrated, lettered, and probably colored, this tale from Amazing Mystery Funnies #22 (1940).
It's one of the first of the "law enforcement in space" sub-genre that prospered in pulp and comic sci-fi in the 1930s and 40s, and carried over to TV in the 1950s.
Note: the 1950s TV/radio series Space Patrol was not based on Wolverton's strip.
(Could you imagine them trying to do the aliens in the gambling ship using 1950s-level makeup techniques?)

1 comment:

  1. Now that you mention it, yeah, that character totally looks like a Ferengi to me.

    Great post, I really enjoy reading these classic comics!

    ReplyDelete

Thanx for posting!