Reading Room: ADVENTURES INTO THE UNKNOWN "Why the Leprechauns Left Ireland"

At last, the long-repressed (and never-reprinted) story can be told...

...on, appropriately enough, St Patrick's Day!

So, the left Earth...not just Ireland!
Wotta story!
Leprechauns!
Nikita Khrushchev, Communists and possible Atomic War!
Cape Canaveral!
Plus:  Giants from the center of the Earth!
Does it get any better than this?
I don't think so.

Writer/editor Richard Hughes (under the appropriate pen-name Shane O'Shea) and illustrator Odgen Whitney probably thought the same when they created this whimsical tale for AGC's Adventures into the Unknown #132 (1962).

51 years later, it's my pleasure to present it for your St Patricks Day entertainment.

Now, if you'll excuse me, there's several pints of Guinness Extra Stout in my fridge, waiting to meet me...

Reading Room "Jackie and the Leprechaun King"

For St Patrick's Day, here's an offbeat tale about leprechauns...

...as rendered in an extremely non-traditional way by comics legend Estban Maroto!

Written by Bill DuBay, this somewhat more "heroic fantasy" approach to the legend of leprechauns appeared in Warren's Vampirella #53 (1976) when elves and related creatures were experiencing a revival in popularity due to the 20th Anniversary of JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Be here tomorrow (on the actual St Patrick's Day) for a more traditional story.

Reading Room: LOST WORLDS Feature Pages

Besides stories, comics often run one or two-page features...

Lost Worlds #5 Art by Ross Andru & Mike Esposito

...based on historical or scientific information available at the time...

Lost Worlds #6 Art by Rocco Mastroserio

...or speculation about future developments, again, based on then-current knowledge!

(I love that third panel, showing spacesuit-garbed scientists on a balcony on the satellite!)

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Reading Room: SPACE ACTION "Silicon Monsters from Galaxy X"

If you're a cheesy sci-fi fan like me, you'll go for a story with a title like...

...'cause with a title like that, you're in for a fun (if not totally rational or even coherent) time!

While the writer is unknown, the art for this tale from Ace's Space Action #2 (1952) is attributed to "Jim McLaughlin", who had a short-lived comics career doing work primarily for Ace!

After that publisher dropped comics in 1955 to concentrate on paperbacks, he did a couple of stories for Atlas/Marvel, then a run of Dell's adaptation of the TV series Gunsmoke.

Then "Jim McLaughlin" disappeared.
Totally.
Unlike most comic book artists who went on to do commercial art or newspaper strips, there's no trace of "Jim McLaughlin" after his brief foray into four-color publishing...and no background about his pre-comics career!
Here's another interesting point...his art style altered considerably during his career.
In this story, the inking looks a lot like the work of long-time artist Jim Mooney!
In fact, a number of panels resemble Mooney's work on the DC strip Tommy Tomorrow, which Jim Mooney was both penciling and inking during the same period as "Jim McLaughlin's" work for Ace!
In McLaughlin's later work (particularly his Gunsmoke art), while the layouts look similar, the inking style is totally-different!
Was "Jim McLaughlin" a pen-name for a penciler working with at least two (if not more) different inkers?

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Reading Room: MYSTERIES OF UNEXPLORED WORLDS "Can This be Real?"

Steve (Spider-Man) Ditko was doing X-Files long before X-Files...

...as this tale from Charlton's Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #9 (1958) demonstrates!

Are we sure those odd-looking men were "helping"?

Only artist Steve Ditko and the unknown writer (who could be Ditko himself) know the answer...and they ain't talking!

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