Friday Fun AMAZING WILLIE MAYS "Diamond Doings" "Splinters" "Balls and Strikes"

Besides tales about the title person, the Amazing Willie Mays one-shot comic we ran yesterday...

...featured humorous one-page "fillers" about (what else) baseball!

Note that every page has at least one Black ballplayer in a cartoon, a rarity in the 1940s-50s unless the illustration focused on a specific Black sports figure!

BTW, "ballhawk" is outdated slang for an expert fielder!
Who says comics ain't educational???

Reading Room AMAZING WILLIE MAYS Willie Mays (1931-2024)

I'll leave the eulogies for the legendary Willie Mays (1931-2024) to those better-equipped to present them.

What I will do is present a couple of tales from a comic published 70 years ago, when he was just beginning his major league career...but, even then, was considered one of the greats of the game!

Eastern Color's 1954 one-shot Amazing Willie Mays heralded a baseball player with, at that point, only two years in the majors!
Mind you, he had won Rookie of the Year in 1951.
But in 1952, Mays was drafted and served two years in the Army, returning to pro baseball in 1954!

BTW, we don't know if the following is actually Willie's "favorite story" or not!

Here's a bonus feature, supposedly using quotes from Willie himself...

Sadly, the comic doesn't list credits for the writers or artists, and Eastern Color has been out of business for decades, so the creatives behind these tales are unknown.

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Autobiography of Willie Mays
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Space Hero Saturdays BARNEY CARR "Attack of the Groteks!"

We like the kool names Space Heroes have!
Buck!
Flash!
Brick!
Barney!

BARNEY???

Yes!

For two issues in 1950, there was a Space Hero named "Barney"!

And, he was a futuristic "space detective", like Lance Lewis and Space Detective/Avenger)!

Note: the pages are damaged, likely by insects, and we're presenting them despite that due to the historical value of the story!

Cover-featured in his very first appearance in Eastern Color's Famous Funnies #191 (1950), Barney Carr: Space Detective didn't do much actual detecting.
He was too busy being a typical square-jawed, two-fisted, ray gun-wielding action hero, kicking alien butt!
Unlike the other features in Famous Funnies, Barney Carr wasn't a reprinted newspaper strip, but an original series!
It only appeared once more, before disappearing into the void, but original art for a third story exists, without any captions or word balloons!
You'll be seeing both of them in the future!

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Mystery in Space

Pulp Fiction Library

(which contains only a couple of stories from this previously-listed volume)

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Space Hero Saturdays BUSTER CRABBE COMICS "Invaders from Beyond"

Though Buster Crabbe starred in more Westerns than any other genre, he's best-known to the public at large as the movie serial Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers!

As we mentioned earlier,  his comic book adventures included sci-fi and high adventure tales as well as Western stories.

This never-reprinted story, cover-featured in Eastern Color's Buster Crabbe Comics #9, combined sci-fi and Western action, though set in the "present" (1953), like Space Western Comics, which was being published at the same time.

The writer is unknown, but the art on both the cover and story is by Mike Roy, who worked steadily in comics from the beginning of the Golden Age in 1941 until 1980!

Note that Buster is Buster Crabbe, not "Buster Crabbe as a character like Billy West" or somesuch in the tale, and it's assumed that he's actually able to do anything he's shown doing in his films.

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

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Thrilling Fantasy Tales

Reading Room CONQUEST "Beowolf the Mighty"

How do you liven up those boring, tired old ancient myths?

...why, turn one of the characters into a Tyrannosaurus Rex, of course!

Usually, Grendel is a demonic or ape-like beast.
Certainly, he's never been portrayed as a dinosaur before (or since)!
This 1955 one-shot from Eastern Color featured tales of real-life adventurers...except for Beowolf (which is usually spelled "Beowulf").
We don't know who the writer is so there's no way to tell if it was his/her idea or artist Bill Ely's to make Grendel a dinosaur!
BTW, Ely had a lot of experience rendering dinosaurs in sci-fi tales for almost every comics company of the 1950s and 60s, including a stint as the artist for DC's Rip Hunter: Time Master, who now leads the team on the CW's Legends of Tomorrow TV series!