Reading Room STARSTREAM "City"

Here's a tangled tale of time travel...

...based on the prose short story "A Nice Place to Visit" by Stephen Goldin.

Adapted by Silver Age comics veteran Arnold Drake and illustrated by Jose Delbo, this story was part of the 1976 anthology mini-series Starstream, Western Publishing's move away from the Gold Key imprint and branding to create a less-juvenile presence in newsstands, supermarket magazine racks, and bookstores.

Note: there were less than a dozen dedicated comic book shops in America in 1976!

The 64-page anthologies featured comic adaptations of short stories by noted (and marketable) authors like Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson, Theodore Sturgeon, A E van Vogt, and Anne McCaffrey, with a couple of non-adaptation stories by Arnold Drake and series editor Roger Elwood to fill out the page count.

Sadly, the project, which came out a year before Star Wars was released, disappeared within six months.

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Questar
OOP 1979 Trade Paperback Reprinting Most (but not all) of the Material from the Starstream Mini-Series
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Monday Madness GHOSTLY TALES "Anywhere Machine!"

This starts out as a hard sci-fi adventure...

...but it ends as an entirely different genre!

The title of the comic should tip you off as to what genre!

At this point, Charlton had cancelled their sci-fi anthologies, so this story by writer Nick Cuti, layout artist Wally Wood, and penciler-inker Tom Sutton ended up in Ghostly Tales #107 (1973)!
You'll note the addition of the book's host, Mr L Dead, to the splash and a couple of captions.

When the tale was reprinted in Charlton's revived Space War #30 (1978)...

...Deth was gone!

Note: the cover by Wayne Howard, who started his career working for Wally Wood, has never been reprinted!

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Reading Room STRANGE SUSPENSE STORIES "One Last Chance"

A never-reprinted, Ditko-rendered, Silver Age tale...

...is the sort of thing we delight in presenting to our blog's loyal fans!

I rather like the idea that the protaganists will never know if they succeeded in saving the future...or inadvertently destroyed it!

Charlton's Strange Suspense Stories V3#2 (1968) was written entirely by Steve Skeates, though the stories in the anthology were illustrated by different artists.

Apparently editor Dick Giordano had planned to allow a single writer to carry each issue, with Denny O'Neil penning all the stories in the first issue and Skeates scripting the the tales in the second one.

Giordano's departure to DC scuttled the concept, and from the third issue onward, a variety of writers would fill the pages.

BTW, though the tale was never reprinted, the cover was...

...to represent a different Ditko-illustrated story reprint in Charlton's Space War #31 (1978)!

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Unexplored Worlds

Steve Ditko Archives, Vol 2

Reading Room WEIRD TALES OF THE FUTURE "Engine That Came Though Time!"

Is it ethical to trick someone...
...if a good result occurs because of that trickery?

Read this tale, then decide!

Was Ranu justified in doing what he did in this tale from Key Publications' Weird Tales of the Future #4 (1952), by illustrator Eugene Hughes and an unknown writer?

You tell me...

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Reading Room MARVEL BOY COMICS "Planetary Error"

Combining an impulsive, know-it-all teen-ager...

...with the classic "If you time travel, don't change anything!" warning and you end up with this...

No matter what the time period, teen-agers can be real schmucks!

Though the creatives behind the story are unknown, we can tell you it appeared in Atlas' Marvel Boy #2 (1951).
We can also tell you (though you might have guessed it from the header on almost every page) that the comic changed its' name to Astonishing as of the next issue (#3).
Nobody seems to know why the book's name was changed, since the title feature, Marvel Boy, the first Atlas Comics super-hero of the 1950s (though the second Timely/Atlas character to use the name), appeared through issue #6!
You can read about him HERE!
BTW, the series ran for another 60 issues, until 1957.

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Best of Reading Room ASTONISHING "The Scientists"

We re-presented a later version (by Stan Lee & Steve Ditko, no less) of this tale on Tuesday!

This original version is a page longer and has a couple of rather witty touches which put the lie to the concept "If our meddling with time changed anything, we'd notice!"

This never-reprinted story, penciled by Harry Lazarus and inked by George Klein, from Atlas' Astonishing #9 (1952) is based on one of the basic rules of time-travel; "don't change anything in the past, or you'll alter the future"...which is in direct contradiction to another of the basic rules of time-travel; "no matter what you do, you can't change the future".

Hey, I'm just telling you the rules.

I never said they made sense...