Some people called early television "just radio with pictures"...
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| Click on the art to enlarge |
...a premise taken to an obvious extreme in this tale...
Unfortunately, the technological level of tv fx in 1958, when this story was published in
Race for the Moon #1, make the events of the story
highly unlikely.
The primary reason the inspiration for this story, the 1938
War of the Worlds radio hoax by
Orson Welles and
the Mercury Theatre of the Air, worked was because peoples'
imaginations ran wild, fueled by sound effects and well-written dialogue!
The "visuals" were in their heads!
Nonetheless, the unknown writer and artist Bob Powell did their best in only five pages.
And, the comic's intended audience, kids aged 9-15,
could accept the premise, especially if they had
no knowledge of the Welles radio show, which wasn't often rebroadcast until old radio show reruns made a comeback in the mid-1960s on college radio stations and lp albums.
NOTE: We've just discovered that this story is a
radically toned-down version of a tale that appeared a decade earlier!
Tomorrow we'll show you how it ORIGINALLY looked...pre-Comics Code, which has NEVER been reprinted!
