Cover Gallery SPEED CARTER: SPACEMAN & SPACE SQUADRON

Here's a look at the covers for the complete run of Speed Carter: SpaceMan...

Art by Bill Everett

Oddly, though they're really nice pieces of art, they never relate to the stories inside the book!

Art by Carl Burgos & ?

Art by Bill Everett

Art by Mike Sekowsky & ?

Art by Mort Lawrence

Art by Joe Maneely

Bill Everett (who didn't do any inside art) did two covers, and Joe Maneely (who did all the Speed stories in the first three issues finally got to do a cover with the last issue!

Here are the covers for Space Squadron.

Note the variants in foreign editions with retitled and redrawn covers...

Art by Sol Brodsky & Christopher Rule.

Vignettes at bottom by George Tuska.

Art by Werner Roth

Canadian Edition

Easily one of the worst recompositing jobs I've ever seen!

Art by Werner Roth

British Edition

Why were the aliens' second heads removed?

Art by Werner Roth

Canadian Edition

Now, this is how you recompose a cover!

Art by Sol Brodsky & Joe Maneely

Art by Sol Brodsky

British

Art by Sol Brodsky &?

We've decided to keep Space Force Saturdays at least through Halloween, so watch this space (pun intended) next week!

Space Force Saturdays SPACE WORLDS "Midnight Horror"

Our final story from Space Squadron/Space Worlds features yet another scheme by Edgar Revere...

....the strip's resident cowardly Baltar/Dr Smith-type and son of esteemed Space Squadron commander Blast Revere!

Ignore the fact that outer space itself is a vacuum, so the Earth couldn't leave a "vacuum trail", and the story's quite entertaining!

Sadly, Edgar never received his just desserts in the strip.

Illustrated by Allen Bellman, this never-reprinted tale from Atlas' Space Worlds #6 (1952) was the final adventure of the Space Squadron before they jetted off into publishing limbo.

Next week: we've run out of stories from Speed Carter: SpaceMan and Space Squadron, but there's still a gallery of kool covers from both series that you'll see next week, along with info about what will follow in the Saturday posting slot!

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Taylor Illustrated History

Science Fiction Comics 

Space Force Saturdays SPACE WORLDS "Vengance of X-1"

One of the kool things about sci-fi comics is that, until the late 1970s...

...they visualized concepts, environments, technology, and situations no then-existing SFX technology could convincingly-show to an audience!

Artist Allen Bellman and the unknown writer really let their imaginations run amok in this never-reprinted story from Atlas' Space Worlds #6 (1952).
No TV show of the era, and few feature films (perhaps War of the Worlds or Forbidden Planet) could possibly have mustered the SFX technology to even approach this sort of thing, which today could be done by a high-budget TV show or mid-budget feature film.

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Mysteries in Space

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Space Force Saturdays SPACE SQUADRON & SPEED CARTER: SPACEMAN "Famous Explorers of Space" Part 6

Both Atlas' Space Squadron and Speed Carter: SpaceMan had "future history" features...

...set in the "past", like this never-reprinted story from Atlas' Space Worlds #6 (1953), illustrated by Christopher Rule, which took place in an unnamed period after the 1960s!

In the alternate future world of Speed Carter, we discover women (even female astronauts) are not always treated as equals...

...but, when push comes to shove, they're as brave and as any men when facing the dangers of deep space exploration!

This story of a future fighting feminist from Speed Carter: SpaceMan #6 (1953) is written (like all the Speed Carter-related tales) by Hank Chapman, and illustrated by Bill Benulis, an artist who entered the comics field in 1949 and stayed only four years in the business.

He became a postman when the comics industry almost collapsed due to the "Seduction of the Innocent" witchhunt (that claimed comics caused juvenile delinquency) swept the country.

But, because he was so prolific, unpublished material by him kept appearing in comics until 1957!

Besides "Famous Explorers", Space Squadron/Space Worlds also presented "future history tales" about the guy who was young hotshot Jet Dixon's crusty Commander-in-Chief when he was a young hotshot pilot...

Young Blast Revere's final adventure (also from Atlas' Space Worlds #6) was illustrated by George Klein.

Both Klein and Christopher Rule were primarily inkers, because, while they were competent pencilers, they could ink faster than they could pencil.

So, in a business where the per-page rate was low, specializing in inking paid better!
BTW, this is the final "Famous Explorers" entry, since both Speed Carter and Space Squadron/Space Worlds were cancelled with #6!
But, there are still several more tales from both titles to tell....

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Space Force Saturdays SPACE WORLDS "Temptress of Jupiter!"

There are secrets aplenty under the clouds of the Solar System's largest planet...

...but will Jet Dixon and his crew discover them?

In the 1950s we weren't certain of what lay under Jupiter's cloud cover, so sci-fi writers had total freedom to guess what was there.

Artist Allen Bellman and the unknown writer gave it their best shot in Atlas' Space Worlds #6 (1952).

(The Space Squadron comic was retitled for unknown reasons, though the features were the same as in previous issues!)

The rebranding didn't work since this would be the final issue, under any title, of the run!

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Space Force Saturdays SPACE SQUADRON "Challenge of the Moon Things!"

With our own, delayed, Olympics finally about to get under way...

..let's see how the games are handled when multiple alien species, each with their own unique physical attributes, go head-to-head in sporting competition!

So, alien species are as sexist as humans?
Does this mean it's a (literally) universal tendency?

This never-reprinted tale from Atlas' Space Squadron #5 (1952) is amusing, showing its' Terra-centric tendencies in how EarthMen always triumph, even in sporting events that other species should win, due to naturally-superior abilities!

It's almost as if the games were rigged to favor humans...

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Mysteries in Space

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