Space Force Saturdays SPACE BUSTERS "Empress of Belzar"

Space Busters was a war/military comic...set in the future.

Think of it as a less-sophisticated version of Starship Troopers, sorta "Sgt Fury or Sgt Rock in Space"!

Interestingly, it featured a woman (albeit a non-combatant) as a regular member of the front-line team.
(A rarity in comics until the late 1980s)

As to the plot...the planet Belzar has invaded our Solar System, managing to conquer everything from Pluto to Mars, with Earth next in line.

However, Earth's military is about to launch a counter-attack...

Unlike the other strips we've been running, this wasn't a spacegoing police force, but a "marines in space" series.

(BTW, for those who were wondering, Space Busters wasn't "inspired" by Robert Heinlein's Hugo Award-winning Starship Troopers since it pre-dates it by more more than half a decade!)
Illustrated by EC Comics mainstay Bernie Krigstein (who was also the artist on ZD's Space Patrol, based on the TV series), this premiere tale from Ziff-Davis' Space Busters #1 (1952) was likely scripted by editor Jerry (Superman) Siegel!

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Starship Troopers #0

Markosia Comics

Friday Fun / CoronoaVirus Comics MAD "Look at Modern-Day Bacteria"

Think our concerns about diseases and a possible plague are something new?

This never-reprinted feature from MAD Magazine #153 (1972) combines humor with medicine and politics!

Among those whom writers Max Brandel & Frank Jacobs and artist Bob Clarke skewer are President Richard Nixon (R), Vice-President Spiro Agnew (R), conservative Presidential candidate George Wallace (I), and the radical liberal Students for a Democratic Society!

(Google them if you're too young to remember!)

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MAD About Trump!

A Brilliant Look at Our Brainless disgraced ex-President (up to 2018)

and/or

MAD About the Trump Era Error

(2018-2020)

Reading Room UNKNOWN WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION "Kick the Can"

It's said that space opera = "horse opera" with rayguns instead of six-guns...

...and just like the revisionist westerns of the '60s and '70s, this Bronze Age tale is a more sophisticated version of that concept.

Written and illustrated by Bruce Jones, this never-reprinted tale from Marvel's Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction #4 (1975) takes the cliches of both horse opera and film noir, puts them in a sci-fi setting and makes them work in a way the Comics Code would not have allowed in a color book.
(Helping a wife escape her husband through extra-legal means and deliberately allowing someone to die were both no-nos to the Code.)
Plus, Jones' classical illustration style gives the tale an emotional resonance a more-stylized artist wouldn't have achieved.
BTW, Jones is still active in the field, as his LinkedIn site shows.

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Bruce Jones'

Razor's Edge

Wednesday Worlds of Wonder LOST WORLD "Monsters from the Blue"

With the school to train resistance fighters now secure...

...Hunt Bowman and Lyssa press on with their mission to retake Earth from the Volta invaders!

Will Bowman and his cadets utilize this flying sub (and other similar craft) against the VoltaMen?

Will Earth be freed?

I'm afraid we'll never know!

Sadly, this story from Fiction House's Planet Comics #64 (1950) was the final Golden Age tale of The Lost World.

Though Planet Comics continued for another year, it went all-reprint!

But this is not the end of Hunt Bowman and Lyssa's adventures in Lost World at Wednesday Worlds of Wonder!

Nest week you'll see the only Lost World text feature ever published!

And after that, the Bronze Age reboot of the strip from Blackthorne's all-new Planet Comics!

Don't remember it?

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A Slight Case of Murder

and Other Stories

Illustrated by George Evans

Reading Room ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN "U.F.O's...Bunk or the Real Thing?"

From the final issue of one of comics' longest-running fantasy anthologies...

Art by "Lou Wahl" (Kurt Schaffenberger)

...comes a tale about an always-popular subject!

Written (as was almost everything at ACG) by editor Richard Hughes using a pseudonym, this cover-featured, never-reprinted story from Adventures into the Unknown #174 (1967) was illustrated by Bob Jenney, whose experience with sci-fi/fantasy included numerous movie adaptations for Dell Comics like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and Frankenstein).

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Taylor Illustrated History

Science Fiction Comics 

Monday Mars Madness WAR COMICS "Greg Gilday and the Martians"

Perhaps the last thing readers of Dell's War Comics expected...

...was a series about an interplanetary war and a superhuman hero!

But that's what they got when this strip premiered in Dell's War Comics #2 (1940)!

In the Golden Age, creators, unrestrained by preconceptions, tried genre mash-ups we wouldn't dream of doing today, hoping to find a "hook" to grab readers!
Drawn (and probably written) by Richard Fletcher, this never-reprinted series only ran three chapters before disappearing despite the final strip ending with a caption promising more adventures!
Note: the Richard Fletcher who did this strip is not the Dick Fletcher who worked with Chester Gould before taking over as the artist on the Dick Tracy newspaper strip in 1977.
This guy is Richard Martin Fletcher.
The Dick Tracy artist was Richard E Fletcher and didn't begin his art career until after being discharged from the Army in 1945.

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Ray Bradbury's

Martian Chronicles

Are You Reading the Literary Sensation of Summer 2021?

Specifically, the never-reprinted all-original novel from over five decades ago...

... which combines the best of both the Caped Crusader's Silver Age comics and the legendary 1960s TV show in peerless prose?

If not, what do we have to do to convince you?

Now if that doesn't send you hurling headlong to at least take a look by clicking...

HERE

...you're not truly a Bat-Fan!