Showing posts with label anthology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthology. Show all posts

Sunday, September 21, 2025

Enjoy an Autumnal ADVENTURE IN ROMANCE with "September Squall"

Since it's September and the cold winds are beginning to blow...
...we thought we'd re-present one of the few romance comic stories actually tied-in with the season from an experimental magazine-sized comic book which featured romance stories with high adventure, historical, and Western tales in a kool cross-genre mash-up!

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Reading Room / Tales Twice Told STRANGE WORLDS "Sabotage on Space Station 1"

...now you'll see where that "flavor" came from!
Damn, we humans are good at this sort of world-saving stuff, eh?
This Norman Nodel-illustrated tale from Avon's Strange Worlds #7 (1952) could have been the basis of an episode of Space: 1999 or Classic Star Trek with just a couple of tweaks!
As to why it was reworked...
Eerie Publications had been using photostats and negatives from defunct comics companies as the source material for their b/w magazine line.
About a year in, they started using South American artists eager to break into the comics market and American artists like Dick Ayers and Chic Stone (who were losing work as the Silver Age ended and comics companies cut back their lines) to re-do old stories with a more contemporary style.
Some illustrators totally-redid the art, using new "camera angles" and clothing/technology designs reflecting contemporary tastes.
In this particular case, artist Cirilo Munoz just lightboxed and re-inked the Nodel artwork!
Editor Carl (Golden Age Human Torch) Burgos eliminated the opening captions and modified a couple of captions and dialogue balloons, but otherwise left the unknown writer's original script intact.
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Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Reading Room / Tales Twice Told WEIRD WORLDS "Terror on Station One!"

Here's an early 1970s sci-fi space opera tale...
...that reads and "feels" like a 1950s sci-fi space opera story!
And there's a good reason for that!
Wonder why this Cirillo Munoz-rendered tale from Eerie Publications' Weird Worlds V1N10 (1970) feels so...out of date in an early 1970s magazine?
Perhaps because it's almost a line-for-line, panel for panel, re-do of a 1950s story!
Be here Thursday to see the original four-color version by a different artist!
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Monday, September 8, 2025

Monday Mecha Madness ROCKET SHIP X "Robot Rebellion"

We're DOOMED, do you hear me?
DOOMED, because 2035 will bring a...
...as shown in this never-reprinted tale from Fox's one-shot sci-fi anthology Rocket Ship X (1951)!
It's actually a decent little tale whose creators, regrettably, are anonymous.
Think James Cameron read it as a kid?
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Vol 3
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Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Reading Room / Tales Twice Told AMAZING ADULT FANTASY "Why Won't They Believe Me?"

Stan (the Man) Lee felt a good story...
...such as this one from Atlas' Amazing Adult Fantasy #7 (1961), was worth repeating...
Scripted by Lee and illustrated by his Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, the tale was typical of the "gotcha" snap-ending stories made popular in mass culture by Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone, but done a decade earlier in comics by the EC Comics horror and sci-fi/fantasy books (though usually with more gore).
Lee re-used (and expanded) the plot almost a decade later when he re-did it with another Silver Age legend, as you'll see Thursday...

Monday, September 1, 2025

Monday Mecha Madness CRAZY "Robert the Robot!"

Here's a long-lost tale from the era when MAD comic clones filled America's newsstands!
(Which bring up the question...does anybody under 30 even know what a "newsstand" is?)
While the story's not a classic, it's not bad, either!
The amazingly versatile Joe Maneely handled the art for this never-reprinted tale from this never-reprinted tale from Atlas' Crazy V1N7 (1954), but the script is not by Stan Lee...who would've had his name on it if he had penned the story!
Maneely could do anything; sci-fi, horror, war, romance, western, even humor, as this story demonstrates!
If not for his tragic death falling from a New York suburban commuter train, he would have been one of the major talents of Marvel Comics in the 1960s.
Atlas had no less than three MAD clones going at once; CrazyWild, and Riot!
MAD themselves commented on the proliferation of clones, not only from Atlas, but virtually every other publisher with this opener for their spoof of the 1950s movie Julius Ceasar by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood...
When MAD converted to a b/w magazine, Atlas dropped the three color comics and launched the b/w Snafu,which only lasted three issues!
Atlas/Marvel would revive Crazy twice more!
First, in early 1973 as a reprint book of Not Brand Echh stories.
Then, in late 1973 as a b/w magazine going head-to-head with MAD, and surviving until 1983 for 96 issues!
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Thursday, August 28, 2025

Reading Room STRANGE WORLDS "Invasion from the Abyss!"

Alien Invasions of Earth are a Popular Story Concept...
...even when the "aliens" are from inside the Earth, rather than outer space!
This story from Avon's Strange Worlds #3 (1951) was a "Fleagle Gang" production.
The "Fleagles" were a group of artists including Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood, Angelo Torres, and George Woodbridge who would help each other out on tight deadlines by doing a "jam" with individuals penciling and inking different pages and even different panels on a single page, producing some absolutely-amazing visuals!
Trivia: the group was named by EC Comics editor/writer/artist Harvey Kurtzman.

The idea of advanced beings living inside the Earth and invading/reconquering the surface was very popular in the early 1950s.
Richard Shaver and 1930s-40s pulp magazine editor Raymond A Palmer caused a media firestorm with a series of stories presenting a theory that combined the "civilization inside the Earth" concept with another pop culture phenomenon...flying saucers!
Numerous readers wrote in, claiming that they had actually seen creatures and vehicles exactly as described in the stories!
The "Shaver Hoax" (as it came to be known) influenced 1930s-50s sci-fi/fantasy ranging from the two-part pilot episode of the TV's Adventures of Superman "Superman and the Mole Men" to movie serials like The Phantom Empire and movies like Brain Eaters!
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Vol 3
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Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Reading Room STRANGE WORLDS "I Couldn't Stop the Runaway Comet!"

Some people believe we're entering the Biblical End Times!
Well, we here at Atomic Kommie Comics don't believe that!
We believe the End of the World be something more like this scientifically-inaccurate, never-reprinted tale about death by extreme heat from Atlas' Strange Worlds #5 (1959)!
There's also a really kool Easter Egg within the story!
See if you can find it!
No, we're not going to explore whether God exists or not.
Though popularized as fireballs in bad science fiction, the fact that comets were really composed primarily of rock and ice which vaporized as they approached the Sun, creating the "tail", was known as far back as Issac Newton's time.
So the whole idea of the comet generating heat like a star was ludicrous...even in the 1950s!
Though the writer is unknown, the artist was Steve (Spider-Man) Ditko.
That fact is crucial for understanding the Easter Egg...
The name "Victor Sage", used here for the extremely-fallible protagonist, later became "Vic Sage",  the secret identity of one of Ditko's more durable creations...Charlton's The Question!
Besides becoming a DC mainstay with his own title and spotlighted appearances in the Justice League animated series, the character was the basis for Rorschach in Alan Moore's "reimagining" of classic comic character archetypes in Watchmen!
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Stan Lee and Steve Ditko
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