Reading Room STRANGE TALES OF THE UNUSUAL "Stowaway in the Sky!"

Here's a never-reprinted Cold War tale...

...about secrets, spies, and sabotage from Atlas' Strange Tales of the Unusual #9 (1957).

Written by Carl Wessler and illustrated by Ed Winiarski, this was a typical 1950s tale of sneaky Russkies being out-maneuvered by smarter Americans!

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Science Fiction Comics

Taylor History of Comics

Vol 3

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Friday Fun BLAST-OFF "Danger! Atoms!"

Some stories need little extrapolation...

...such as this never-reprinted short by writer/artist Howard Nostrand from Harvey's Blast-Off! #1 (1965)

Cute, eh?

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Chilling Archives of Horror Comics Volume 7

Howard Nostrand's Nightmares

Space Secret Agent Saturdays MYSTERY IN SPACE "Operation Phobos"

We presented the first Interplanetary Investigations tale from the Swinging Sixties HERE...

..now here's their second, final, never-reprinted adventure from DC's Mystery in Space #102 (1965)!

Note Sean Connery-lookalike Damos appears again.

Also note (from the ad at the end of the story), this month also saw the Strange Adventures premiere/origin of "The Man with the Animal Powers" who would morph a couple of issues later into superhero Animal Man, who's still active in DC's comics and tv series over 50 years later, unlike the secret agents of Interplanetary Investigations!

Written by Dave Wood, illustrated by Gil Kane, the series had a lot of potential.

Jan and Davos could've been a futuristic Man from U.N.C.L.E./Wild, Wild West/I Spy duo...

Ah, what could have been...

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Mystery in Space

Pulp Fiction Library

(which contains only a couple of stories from this previously-listed volume)

Space Secret Agent Saturdays MYSTERY IN SPACE "Secret of the Double Agent"

It was 1965, and secret agents were everywhere...

...even DC's Mystery in Space, whose 100th issue, introed a cover-featured "space spy" series!

(With a cover by Dick Dillin and Sheldon Moldoff!)

Written by Dave Wood, illustrated by Gil Kane, and guest-starring a Sean Connery-lookalike, an ongoing Interplanetary Investigations series seemed like a sure bet, but it disappeared after only one more appearance two issues later!
(BTW, neither of them have been reprinted!)

Instead, a new character, Ultra: the Multi-Alien took over the book until cancellation with #110!

Pity, since the Interplanetary Investigations strip showed such promise.

Considering DC had the rights to James Bond (which is why there were no comic adaptations of any of the 007 flicks after Dr No, which didn't do well due to being released months before the movie came out), could you imagine what Gil Kane could've done illustrating any of the other pre-Roger Moore Bond movies?
Sadly, we'll never know.
Two notes:
1) The comic rights to 007 eventually lapsed and Marvel did two movie adaptations in the 1980s, For Your Eyes only and Octopussy.
Neither were big sellers.
2) DC released Doctor No as part of the Showcase tryout comic as shown HERE.)

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Mystery in Space

Pulp Fiction Library

(which contains only a couple of stories from this previously-listed volume)

Reading Room ALARMING TALES "Secret Weapon"

We've worried about homeland security for decades...

...but, quite frankly, we're damned good at it!

OK, maybe we haven't produced an invisibility device/formula...yet, but we Americans can handle anything terrorists can thtrow at us, as this never-reprinted Silver Age story from Harvey's Alarming Tales #4 (1958) shows!

BTW, it's written by Jack Oleck (a talented novelist and comic book writer who was the brother-in-law of Alarming Tales editor Joe Simon) and illustrated by Johnny Quest's co-creator Doug Wildey!

Russkies in Iran: T-MAN "Death Trap in Iran" & "Trouble's Double"

What happens when you combine Russkies and Iran in a spy story?

Besides a Repug's wet-dream, you get this kick-butt tale from Quality's T-Man #3 (1952)!

But, that's not all!

There's also this sanitized-for-your-protection, Comics Code-modified reprint from Quality's T-Man #31 (1956), which waters down all the kool hard-boiled elements from the original tale...and makes the Russkies into generic "Communists"!

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G-Men, T-Men and Spies

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Monday Mars Madness MAN FROM S.R.A.M. "Madhouse in Hollywood!"

In the Silver Age, comics mixed genres with wild abandon...

...as this tale, which combines no less than three of them demonstrates, albeit a bit ham-handedly!

When the protaganist has to spend half the story explaining his name, you know the writer's really desperate.

Which is surprising since the guy who penned this tale is Otto Binder, a prolific sci-fi writer who not only scripted classic Superman and Golden Age Captain Marvel stories (including The Monster Society of Evil serial!), but also wrote the first Marvel Comics novel, The Avengers Versus the Earth-Wrecker!

But this never-reprinted, Carl Pfeufer-illustrated tale from Harvey's Jigsaw #2 (1966) is so incredibly-silly that it's surprising Binder was so over-the-top!

Personally, I suspect editor Joe Simon rewrote the story, inserting the SRAM = MARS explanation on practically every page.

Note: Though identified as "Jigsaw" in the indicia, the book's working title was apparently "Big Hero Adventures", which appears as a sub-title on both issues' covers and title pages as well as on the original art for the first issue.

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Hero-a-Go-Go

Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, and Culture of the Swinging Sixties

Reading Room BLAST-OFF "Danger! Atoms!"

Underrated writer/artist Howard Nostrand offers...

Here's the original art from the never-reprinted tale published in Harvey's 1965 one-shot anthology Blast Off!

What does it all mean?

Discuss among yourselves!

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The Future WAS Fantastic!™ 

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Fifty Years Ago...the Final Frontier!

The Fall 1966 TV season was a landmark for TV sci-fi/fantasy!

There were at least two series every night in Prime Time (sometimes opposite each other, which in those pre-DVR days drove us NUTS)!

(NO Internet! NO YouTube! NO Streaming Video! NO DVD/Blu Rays! Not even VHS Tapes!)

But, every night, after dinner (and presuming you finished your homework)...

Spies!

Super-Heroes!

Comedies with monsters/witches/genies/time-traveling astronauts, etc!

Straight sci-fi with The Invaders, and three Irwin Allen series (Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, and Time Tunnel!

And, of course, the greatest of all...

Original 1966 NBC promo poster. Art by James (Doc Savage) Bama!

It was an amazing time to be eight years old!
Even though my family had two huge 13" TVs, both of them were b/w, so I didn't see all this stuff in color until the '70 when my dad finally got a color set!
(Some, like Captain Nice, I didn't see in color until VHS and DVD copies were available!)
But even in monochrome, those shows enthralled me.
So, tonite, I'm settling down in front of the tube (a 50-inch flat-screen) with my own mini-marathon of 50-year old sci-fi!
Batman "Shoot a Crooked Arrow" (which, technically, aired on Sept. 7) & "Walk the Straight and Narrow"
Star Trek "The Man Trap"
(Bewitched and Jericho [A spy series set in World War II Europe] also ran on Thursdays, but didn't begin their season until Sept 15th!)

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Fantastic Television

Happy Birthday, Mr Bond! Now Die...

It's Sean Connery's 83rd Birthday...

Inside cover of Showcase #43

...so why not celebrate by visiting our "brother" blog Secret Sanctum of Captain Video™ where you can read the never-reprinted DC Comics adaptation of Sean's 007 debut in Doctor No!

Before you say "But, that's a reprint of the Classics Illustrated version available only in England!", I'll point out that numerous changes (which are compared in the blog posts) were made by DC in both text and art!

And, while the Classics Illustrated version has been translated and printed all over the world, the DC version has never been reprinted!

Because Showcase #43 came out months before the movie debuted in America, it sold poorly, and DC didn't exercise their 10-year option to do more James Bond tie-ins!

Ironically, in 1972, DC realized they were about to lose the rights to do 007 comics and considered doing an entire series of one-shot movie adaptations up to, and including, the current film, but Sean Connery's announcement that Diamonds are Forever would be his last film in Bondage (ouch) put the kibosh on those plans!

That's why there were no comic adaptations from Gold Key or Dell (who were doing comics based on every movie and TV show they could get their hands on) during the height of '60s Bond-mania!

Reading Room: PUSSYCAT "Cool & Carefree Capers of a Curvy, Cuddly Chick!"

We showed you HERE how Phantom Lady handled terrorists at the 1948 Olympics...

...now, as the real Olympic Games wind down, look at how Agent PussyCat dealt with danger in a similar situation 20 years later (and 44 years ago)!

This tale originally appeared in Male Annual #5 (1967), but this is from the one-shot PussyCat (1968) that reprinted her stories from the various "laddy" magazines published by Martin Goodman, who also owned Marvel Comics at the time.

The writer is officially-unknown, but the scripter is probably Stan Lee or Larry Lieber, and the artist is pretty clearly good-girl legend Bill Ward with inking by Bill Everett.

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PussyCat: Agent of S.C.O.R.E.

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