Space Hero Saturdays AMAZING ADVENTURES OF BUSTER CRABBE "Thing From Out of Space"

This cover from Lev Gleason's Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe #4 (1954)...

...promises Flash Gordon-type adventure, complete with a Ming the Merciless surrogate!
But the interplanetary tale under the cover is quite different!

Each issue of Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe promoted tales in the three genres actor Buster Crabbe was best-known for...sci-fi, jungle adventure, and Westerns!
Usually, the cover art matched the characters and/or plot of one of the features!
But in this case, the cover had nothing to do with the interior story!
Was it meant for the next issue, and a story not yet created?
Did it replace a cover about this issue's Western or jungle adventures that missed the deadline, and since this was the last issue of the comic, did the editor say "why waste what I already paid for? It won't make any difference!"

The answers are lost to the mists of time...

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Space Hero Saturdays AMAZING ADVENTURES OF BUSTER CRABBE "Invisible Monsters of Callisto"

With a title like that, you know you're in for space-going excitement...

...starring the greatest sci-fi/fantasy movie serial hero of all...Larry (Buster) Crabbe!

Penciled by Alex (Space Ghost) Toth and inked by Mike Peppe, this never-reprinted tale from Lev Gleason's Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe #3 (1953) delivered on the promise on every cover of the series which promised tales of Space, Jungle, and Western action in every issue...the three movie genres Buster appeared in from the 1930s to the 1950s!
(If he ever did a musical or comedy, nobody told me!)
Note: the comic writers and artists always showed Crabbe as "Buster Crabbe", not Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Billy the Kid, Tarzan, or any of the characters he portrayed, while postulating he could do anything in real-life that he was shown doing on-screen!

There's even more alien butt-kicking four-color action with the greatest movie action hero of the 1940s-50s to come!
Watch for it!

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Space Hero Saturdays AMAZING ADVENTURES OF BUSTER CRABBE "I Cover Mars"

He was Flash Gordon!

He was Buck Rogers!

He was Thun'da!

He was Tarzan!

And, he was the star of his own comic book series...twice!

From the 1940s to the 60s, numerous celebrities had their own comic books which took the approach that anything they did on movie/tv/radio, they could do in "real life"!

While comics based on Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, et al, just did Western tales, the four-color stories of performers like John Wayne and Buster Crabbe covered as many genres as the actors themselves!

In fact, the issue this short appeared in (Lev Gleason's Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe #1 from 1953) had three tales, this space opera, a jungle adventure, and a Western!
Interestingly, in all of the stories, no matter the locale or time period, Buster is himself, not one of the characters he played!

The first, from Eastern Color, ran a dozen issues over two years and featured art by, among others, Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, George Evans, Bob Powell, and Roy Krenkel, among others.

This tale was illustrated by Ed Martinott, who worked exclusively for Lev Gleason and Good Comics in the early 1950s before switching to advertising.

Pretty good work, including accurate likenesses of Crabbe in most panels.

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Space Hero Saturdays AMAZING ADVENTURES OF BUSTER CRABBE "Dark of the Moon"

He was Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Tarzan, and Thun'da!

(And he would've been a helluva Doc Savage, if they had done a feature or serial in the 1940s!)

He was Larry "Buster" Crabbe, the first (and many say, the greatest) cinema action hero.

A two-time Olympian (with a swimming gold medal to his credit), Buster didn't even have to audition for Flash Gordon. (He came to support a friend who was auditioning, and the director, who had seen Crabbe's earlier work as Tarzan offered him the role on the spot!)

Art by Alex Toth

Like many other action-movie actors of the 1930s-1950s, Crabbe had his own comic book where he's shown as Buster Crabbe, not "Buster Crabbe as Flash Gordon" or somesuch in the tale, and it's assumed that he's actually able to do anything he's been shown doing in his films.

Unlike most of the other matinee idols, Crabbe's comic adventures covered a variety of genres from Western to sci-fi, and even some cross-genre mashups.

(The others, except for John Wayne, were purely Western-themed series.

Wayne, because of his extensive war film work also had Korean War and present-day adventure comic stories in his comic series.)

Though the writer for this wild, never-reprinted tale from Lev Gleason's Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe #2 (1954) is unknown, the artists are Alex Toth (pencils), Mike Peppe (inks) and John Celardo (retouching on Buster's face in several panels).

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Reading Room AMAZING ADVENTURES OF BUSTER CRABBE "Science Lore"

Who says comics ain't educational?

 

One and two-page featurettes, based on the science known at the time, offer fascinating insight into the mindset of the sci-fi/comics writers and what info they had to work with!

This never-reprinted, Pete Morisi-illustrated piece from Lev Gleason's Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe #3 (1954) is typical of the era, except for the fact all the spaceship designs, combining real and fictional vessels are from different eras!
Among them are a Mongo warship from the Flash Gordon comic strip, a ship from the movies Destination Moon and/or Conquest of Space, and what's described as a "WAC Corporal", but is rendered as a German V-2!

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Science Fiction Comics

Taylor History of Comics

Vol 3