Showing posts with label Sensation Mystery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sensation Mystery. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Reading Room SENSATION MYSTERY COMICS "Last Dream!"

Wonder Woman lost her cover feature in DC's Sensation Comics as of this issue (#107 in 1952)...
...when the book was retitled Sensation Mystery, and featured "mysteries" like this one!
(Sensation Comics was Wonder Woman's "sister" title, much as Action Comics is Superman's "brother" comic and Detective Comics is Batman's "brother" book!)
In 1952, horror comics became the "hot" genre, with most comics publishers going "all in" to see who could be the goriest!
DC, though, tried to stay relatively innocuous, refusing to go for the gore.
While their sales didn't skyrocket as many other publishers' did, they managed to stay below the radar during the whole "Seduction of the Innocent" mania.
And, it certainly made reprinting any of the material produced during this period a breeze after the Comics Code was imposed!
This John Broome-written, Carmine Infantino-penciled, and Frank Giacoia-inked tale was typical of DC's output during this period.
(Some say Sy Barry inked it, but expert art identifier Martin O'Hearn thinks it's Giacoia, and I agree with him.)
Straightforward, logical, and effectively-told, it's almost a template for the various stories the anthology would carry until the book's cancellation a year later with #116.
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Thursday, April 14, 2022

Reading Room SENSATION MYSTERY "Vengeance of the Invisible Men!"

Here's a kool, never-reprinted, 1950s sci-fi tale...
...using a combination of different genre cliches!
Illustrated by the legendary Murphy Anderson, this story from DC's Sensation Mystery #110 (1952) combines the following cliches:
Glasses that enable somone to see things nobody else can see!
Creatures from the center of the Earth rising up to attack up!
A heroic human in alien/creature form stopping the enemy from destroying/enslaving humanity!
All of which leads me to believe the unknown writer of this tale is Gardner Fox, who was also working for DC as well as being well-versed in such concepts because he was both an established pulp and paperback novelist and an avid sci-fi fan!
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