Reading Room TREASURY OF PIRATE LORE "Origin of the Buccaneer"

Ever wonder where the term "buccaneer" came from?

This interesting bit of historical trivia appeared in, of all places, Charlton's Soldier & Marine Comics #14 (1955).

However, that was not the first time it saw print!

Previously, it was the inside front cover of Fox's Variety Comics 1950 one-shot which took several unsold comics and bound them together under a new cover!

Note: Inside covers were two-color, instead of the usual four-color used for covers and actual comic pages.

In this case, the second color was Magenta, one of the four colors used in standard printing.

BTW, note the changes in the first and second captions between the Comics Code-approved top version and the earlier non-Code-approved version at bottom!

Boy, were they squeamish in those days!

Be here tomorrow when we'll have some more pirate-themed stuff during our celebration of the new pirate/adventure series Black Sails!

Reading Room: FORBIDDEN WORLDS "Mysteries of the Unknown: Interplanetary Episode"

Here's a tale filled with irony...

...about a special man who held the fate of the world in his hands.

Note: there are some "politically-incorrect" references to mental illness, so it might be NSFW.

Appearing in ACG's Forbidden Worlds #86 (1960), this Richard Hughes-scripted and Ken Landau-illustrated tale was an oddly-modified re-presentation of a story originally-published in a pre-Comics Code issue of Adventures into the Unknown!

For one thing, most of the artwork changes restore the original Ken Landau artwork that was modified by Ogden Whitney in the AitU tale!

(The exception is the splash page which is changed from the original version (which had Landau's signature.)

Plus, an entire plot point, involving the dead dog, which was redrawn in the original story into a "mistaken identity" plotline by Whitney, is restored!

Check out our "brother" blog, Seduction of the Innocent™, tomorrow (Wednesday) for the first version of this tale that the Comics Code disapproved of!

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Telling the T-Man Tale Twice...with Tweaks!

The Comics Code Authority was supposed to "clean up" comics after the Seduction of the Innocent scare of the 1950s, but sometimes they took it to ridiculous levels!
Over at our brother blog, Crime & Punishment™, we presented a tale of a secret agent in Iran as shown HERE.
Pretty standard stuff, nothing too violent or sexy.
No blood, gore, or gratuitous "headlights".
We noted it had been reprinted a couple of years later, so we checked the reprint to see if the printing was cleaner on that version.

Imagine our surprise to discover numerous alterations to both text and art in the reprint (as well as a nifty new cover)!
The original had been published in Quality Comics' T-Man # 3 (1952), the reprint in T-Man #31 (1956).
The original was pre-Code, the reprint was post-Code.
So we decided to present both versions, albeit a week apart due to an already-scheduled Sherlock Holmes story.
HERE's the annotated reprint.
Contrast and compare for yourself!

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Updating Previous Blog Posts...

One of the benefits of the blog's redesign is to show art larger than before...

Before, when you had to click to enlarge the art...

Now, no clicking required!

I'm going thru the blog, "repairing" things where needed.

The Reading Room entries (such as this one) are getting priority, since the art can easily be enlarged.

I'll also be updating or redirecting YouTube links that have expired or been deleted by YouTube.

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Reading Room: "Invasion"--the Original, SCARIER Story!

Yesterday. we presented this tale...

Edited version

...and then we discovered it had been radically-altered from it's first appearance, and that the original version had never been reprinted!
We will now correct that mistake and present pages unseen in over fifty years!
(You can click on any of the pages to enlarge them.)
We'll present the toned-down version first, then the original, scarier version...

Original version

 Note in the original version, both the wife and singer on tv show a lot more cleavage!

Edited version

Original version

Again, more cleavage in the original version...

Edited version

Original version

Oddly enough, the wife's cleavage is unchanged, but the look of terror in the last panel is toned down!

Edited version

Original version

Panel four in the original version is much more gruesome than the edited version.  Note the dialogue balloon is unchanged, even though there's no actual weapons fire in the edited version!

Edited version

 This last page is radically-different! Prepare yourself!

Original version

Wow!

The edited pages were from Race for the Moon #1 (1958)

The original story was from Witches' Tales #21 (1953)

As you can see, the Comics Code Authority insisted on some major redos, including most of the last page!

Whenever possible, we'll present examples of similar "reworking" of stories pre and post-Comics Code!

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