Showing posts with label Lev Gleason. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lev Gleason. Show all posts

Sunday, May 3, 2026

Mifipristone Madness TOPS "Anthony Comstock: Fanatical Reformer"

Is it any wonder MAGA cons are using the work of a puritanical, conservative con-man from the 19th Century...

...to promote and serve their anti-choice agenda in the 21st Century?







Both Federal and local Republican politicians are currently attempting to use the ancient Comstock Act's19th Century definitions of "obscene material" (which includes birth control printed information and contraceptive drugs) to prevent them from being provided to pregnant women today!
Written by George Hansen and illustrated by Lee Ames, this feature from Lev Gleason's TOPS #2 (1949) presents itself as a "review" of a biography of Comstock, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord (1927)..which praised the man!
However, where the book put Comstock on a pedestal, the comic strip savaged him, taking the material from the tome and presenting it in a historical context.
BTW, you'll note the art here is larger than we usually present.
That's because the periodical it was presented in was tabloid-sized, like Marvel and DC Treasury Editions of the 1970s and 80s and the lettering would be unreadable in our usual 525-pixel wide format.
Editor Charles Biro conceived and produced the mag as an attempt to do an "adult oriented" magazine using the comic book format.
Sadly, it only lasted two issues and either issue is incredibly hard to find!
Happily, Fantagraphics worked with noted writer/artist/historian Michael T Gilbert to produce a superb book reprinting those two issues with an astounding amount of historical material about the periodical...
Note: We presented this post only a few months ago, but with Repugs in states banning abortion re-introducing this two-century old legislation as the reason to validate preventing women from receiving contraceptive drugs or even printed matter about birth control, we felt it was worth showing what the cons are using at the basis for their insanity!
And now that a Federal judge has (hopefully temporarily) stopped patients from being able to recieve needed medication by mail, it seems that (for now) their goal has been achieved!

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Thursday, April 9, 2026

Reading Room AMAZING ADVENTURES OF BUSTER CRABBE COMICS "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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Thursday, October 2, 2025

Halloween Reading Room DOCTOR HORROR

Let's Begin the Month with Horror, Specifically the Self-Named Doctor Horror...
...who made only one appearance...but what an appearance!
If this had been produced in the 1960s, I'd say the artist had gotten some bad weed before producing the latest issue of his underground comix.
In fact, it appeared in Lev Gleason's Captain Battle Comics #2 (1941), illustrated (and probably written) by Don Rico and read by impressionable young kids throughout America!
Publisher Lev Gleason had already introduced comics' first major super-villain, The Claw, in Silver Streak Comics, and it's possible he posed the suggestion to his artists that they come up with something to top The Claw!
Or, it's possible that with a deadline looming and pages to fill, Gleason assigned Rico to come up with a story in a very brief time frame!
We'll never know the answer.
But that shouldn't stop you from enjoying this startling, surreal story!
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Saturday, November 18, 2023

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...

Friday, December 2, 2022

Saturday, September 10, 2022

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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Saturday, April 23, 2022

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

He was Flash GordonBuck RogersTarzanand 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).