Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Reading Room JIM SOLAR: SPACE SHERIFF "Defeats the Moon Missile Men" Conclusion

To stop a group of outlaws hitting frontier settlements, a disguised Sheriff Solar joins a supply caravan and is captured by the criminals...
Buy, if there was ever proof that "space opera" was just "horse opera" with ray guns instead of six-shooters, this was it!
Veteran pulp and comics writer Walter Gibson (The Shadow) also wrote the space western series Spurs Jackson and His Space Vigilantes.
Artist E.C. Stoner (Blue Beetle) had a long career in both pulps and comics from the 1930s to the early 1960s.
Though he had illustrated both Doc Savage and Ajax the Sun Man for Street & Smith (which also published The Shadow), he didn't work with Walter Gibson until they teamed up on Blackstone the Magician for Vital Publications.
(Gibson was a close friend of Harry Blackstone, as well as being a a tlented amateur magician, and wrote all the comic stories based on the celebrity magician at the various publishers who licensed his character as well as scripts for the radio show and "how to do magic" books under Blackstone's name.)
Even after Blackstone moved to Atlas (later Marvel) Comics, and other artists took over, Gibson and  Stoner worked on other projects including these promo booklets for Vital.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

Reading Room JIM SOLAR: SPACE SHERIFF "Defeats the Moon Missile Men" Part 1

From the 1950s comes this weirdly-formatted, never-reprinted strip...
...that was available only as a giveaway inside various products!
Created by writer Walter (The Shadow) Gibson and artist E.C. Stoner (Blue Beetle), this 7" x 3.5" comic was part of the Vital Publications line of promotional giveaways distributed by a variety of merchants inside their products' packaging.
This particular one was included in packages of Rodeo All-Meat Wieners...
Back cover
There were apparently eight other Jim Solar comics, but they're very HTF since they were "self-covered (fragile newsprint covers, like the inside pages, instead of the heavy slick magazine paper most comics use for covers) and included with food products, whose juices would damage the paper!

Monday, March 3, 2014

How Hawks in Congress Think We Can Fight the Russians in the Ukraine...

I'd say they read these comics as kids...
#2 (1953) Art by Jim McLaughlin
...presuming they could actually read!
#3 (1953) Art by an unknown illustrator
Click on the links to our "brother" RetroBlog War: Past, Present & Future...and read about...
&
(which were two different series with two different plotlines and histories from the same publisher!)

Sunday, March 2, 2014

Is This Our Future?

With Russia making moves into the Ukraine. maybe we should look at how it was...
...during the Cold War by looking at what they thought (in the 1950s) would happen in the near-future (the 1960s onward)!
Turns out it wasn't so great, as you'll see when you click on the links to our "brother" RetroBlog War: Past, Present & Future...and read about...
&
(which were two different series with two different plotlines and histories from the same publisher!)

Saturday, March 1, 2014

Reading Room STRANGE SUSPENSE STORIES "Inexplicable"

Here's a bonus Matt Baker story featuring the subject he's most famous for...
...a beautiful woman.
But is she a femme with a fuzzy fetish or something far more sinister?
Written by Joe Gill, penciled by Matt Baker, and inked by VInce Colletta, this never-reprinted story about Nature outsmarting Man appeared in Charlton's Strange Suspense Stories #44 (1959).