Showing posts with label EC Stoner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EC Stoner. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Reading Room JIM SOLAR: SPACE SHERIFF "Defeats the Moon Missile Men" Conclusion

To stop a group of outlaws hitting frontier settlements, a disguised Sheriff Solar joins a supply caravan and is captured by the criminals...
Buy, if there was ever proof that "space opera" was just "horse opera" with ray guns instead of six-shooters, this was it!
Veteran pulp and comics writer Walter Gibson (The Shadow) also wrote the space western series Spurs Jackson and His Space Vigilantes.
Artist E.C. Stoner (Blue Beetle) had a long career in both pulps and comics from the 1930s to the early 1960s.
Though he had illustrated both Doc Savage and Ajax the Sun Man for Street & Smith (which also published The Shadow), he didn't work with Walter Gibson until they teamed up on Blackstone the Magician for Vital Publications.
(Gibson was a close friend of Harry Blackstone, as well as being a a tlented amateur magician, and wrote all the comic stories based on the celebrity magician at the various publishers who licensed his character as well as scripts for the radio show and "how to do magic" books under Blackstone's name.)
Even after Blackstone moved to Atlas (later Marvel) Comics, and other artists took over, Gibson and  Stoner worked on other projects including these promo booklets for Vital.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Reading Room JIM SOLAR: SPACE SHERIFF "Defeats the Moon Missile Men" Part 1

From the 1950s comes this weirdly-formatted, never-reprinted strip...
...that was available only as a giveaway inside various products!
Created by writer Walter (The Shadow) Gibson and artist E.C. Stoner (Blue Beetle), this 7" x 3.5" comic was part of the Vital Publications line of promotional giveaways distributed by a variety of merchants inside their products' packaging.
This particular one was included in packages of Rodeo All-Meat Wieners...
Back cover
There were apparently eight other Jim Solar comics, but they're very HTF since they were "self-covered (fragile newsprint covers, like the inside pages, instead of the heavy slick magazine paper most comics use for covers) and included with food products, whose juices would damage the paper!