Showing posts with label Unlikely Tales. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Unlikely Tales. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Reading Room UNLIKELY TALES "Time Machine"

When two Steves...a long-established pro and eager young up-and-comer...collaborate...
...you get this time-travel tale, set only 14 years from now, with a novel twist!
It's amazing what the comics creators of 1967 thought 70 years later would look like!
Considering that we Baby Boomers thought by 2000 we'd have bases on the Moon and flying cars, it's not unreasonable...
Written by up-and-comer Steve Skeates and illustrated by Spider-Man and Dr Strange co-creator Steve Ditko, this never-reprinted story from the Unlikely Tales anthology collection in Charlton Premiere #4 (1968) offers a surprise twist on the usual "time-traveler from the future may change history" concept.
Trivia:
Skeates wrote all the stories in this issue, a rarity for someone just starting out in the industry.
All the stories were both penciled and inked by their respective artists, also a rarity in a business where, in order to meet deadlines, creators usually either penciled or inked, but not both.
The artists in this issue included Ditko, as well as Pat Boyette, Jim Aparo, and Charlton mainstay Rocke Mastroserio.
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Thursday, April 21, 2022

Reading Room UNLIKELY TALES "Expedition"

Exploring jungles in "deepest, darkest Africa" was a common sci-fi/fantasy trope...
...even into 1968, when this never-reprinted story appeared in Charlton Premiere #4 an anthology under the banner Unlikely Tales.
All the stories in the issue were written by up-and-comer Steve Skeates with a different artist on each tale.
This particular one was rendered by another up-and-comer Pat Boyette with the rest of the tales illustrated by vets Steve Ditko, Rocke Mastroserio, along with another newcomer, Jim Aparo.
Trivia note: all the artists in this issue inked their own pencils, a rather uncommon occurrence in the deadline-driven comics business where the need for speed and high-volume output tended to preclude allowing artists to do both.