Friday Fun WHACK! "Ghastly Dee-fective Comics"

Get out your red/blue 3-D glasses (red on the left, blue on the right)...

 ...as we present a never-reprinted tale co-created by Joe Kubert!

This satirical, silly story, penciled by Norman Maurer and inked by Joe Kubert for St John's Whack! #1 (1953), was was especially-designed for use as a 3-D story (unlike some comic tales that were adapted from 2-D to 3-D during the 1950s 3-D craze.) 

Whack! was one of numerous MAD comic book clones that popped up in the early 1950s.

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The Robots are Coming! THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!!!

Last Week, We Re-Presented a Warning About the Dangers of AI Run Amok...

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday
Then, on Friday, we relieved your tension with a tale of a benevolent, self-aware robot...

Friday
Tomorrow, we return to a trio of robots who show us the best robots may be ones under direct human control!

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Space Hero Satudays BRANT CRAIG: INTERPLANETARY DETECTIVE "Space Pirates of Lanthus IV"

He's not the first "Interplanetary Detective"...

...that honor goes to Planet Comics' Fero: Planetary Detective (who went "inter"planetary in his second appearance)!

But Brant Craig was the longest-lasting, with seven appearances!

Yeah, let's not worry about the innocent spacemen who were just killed during this raid, or their families.

They're just collateral damage...

This never-reprinted premiere from Youthful's Captain Science #2 (1951) was probably illustrated by Bill Molno.

The writer is unknown.

Brant Craig continued through the remaining five issues of Captain Science.

When the book was re-titled Fantastic, Brant (and Captain Science) made their final bows in the first issue.

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Robot Reading Room ROBOTMEN OF THE LOST PLANET "Chapter Three: Rise of the Humans!"

When Last We Left What Remains of Humanity...

Don't you love it when the story synopsizes itself?

(Note that inside front cover illustrator Mort Lawrence did an excellent job matching story artist Gene Fawcette's art style!)

So there's at least one universe where we don't end up enslaved by machines!

Yay!

This 1952 one-shot title from Avon Comics was scripted by Walter (The Shadow) Gibson and rendered by Gene Fawcette.

Avon did an amazing amount of one-time-only titles, probably more than any other publisher.

Some were adaptations of novels Avon's paperback division had published, like An Earth Man on Venus.

Others, like RobotMen, were original stories!

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Robot Reading Room ROBOTMEN OF THE LOST PLANET "Chapter Two: the Robots Rule the Earth!"

When Last We Left the Few Surviving Humans on a Post-Robot Apoocalyptic Earth...

...just five years and we've lost all sense of fashion?

(And what weapons were they using to kill the large mammals that provided those big pelts?)

Tomorrow:

The Astounding Finale as We Witness...

Rise of the Humans!

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Robot Reading Room ROBOTMEN OF THE LOST PLANET "Chapter One: the Massacre of Mankind!"

Yesterday, we showed you a 1970s version of this robo-apocalyptic tale...

...now witness the sheer terror of the original 1950s version!

The art for this 1952 one-shot title from Avon Comics is by Gene Fawcette, an Avon mainstay who did everything from horror to Westerns, to romance to sci-/fantasy!
If you compare the two tales, you'll see the robots are totally different in this version.
They're based on a still-popular squeeze toy first marketed in the early 1950s... Obie the Popping Martian/Panic Pete/Bug-Out Bob!
Who came up with the idea is unknown, and there was no attempt at an actual tie-in between the toy and the comic...

Beyond that, the most unusual aspect of this tale is the scripter...Walter Gibson, aka "Maxwell Grant", the primary writer of the legendary pulp/radio/comic/movie character, The Shadow!

Yeah, that guy!

Gibson, a trained magician-turned writer did very little "hard" sci-fi during most of his long career...except in 1951 to '54, when he edited (and wrote under several pseudonoms) most of the contents of Charlton's short-lived pulp magazine (only two issues) Fantastic Science Fiction, as well as Charlton's Space Adventures comic for its' first eleven issues and co-creating and scripting Spurs Jackson and his Space Vigilantes for Charlton's newly-created Space Western Comics!
(Yes, it really existed, as shown HERE!)
He also wrote this comic and several other one-shots for Avon Comics.

For the record, Gibson also wrote two volumes of prose adaptations of Twilight Zone TV episodes (with a couple of original tales mixed in), but none of those were "hard" sci-fi.
BTW, while this was the only tale adapted into b/w in the 1970s, there were two more chapters of the man vs funky robot saga!

You'll see them Wednesday and Thursday...

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