Reading Room SPACE BUMS "Venus or Bust"

Abbott & Costello were the most popular comedy team of the late 1940s - early 1950s.

So it's not unusual that there were numerous attempts to capture their style of humor on the comics page, including this .

This one-shot tale from Ziff-Davis' Crusader from Mars #2 (1952) was not one of the successful attempts.

It does, however, predate the movie Abbott & Costello Go to Mars by a year.

The flick features them going (by accident) to Venus, which is populated by scantly-clad, beautiful women.

Did the strip inspire the movie?

I have no idea.

In fact, nobody seems to know who wrote or drew this strip.

So many questions...so few answers.

All 12-Month Calendars are NOW 25% Off!

From now until July 4, 2014, all calendars are discounted from $19.99 to $14.99!
And they now have customizable"start dates", so you can give them as birthday presents with the recepient's 2014 birthday month as the first month on the calendar, then running 12 months to their birthday in 2015!
(Can't do that with a store-bought calendar!)

Check them out at 
Atomic Kommie Comics™
2014 12-Month Calendars 

NOT available in stores, only on-line! Order now...before time runs out! ;-)

Steve Savage--battling Korean Commies for over 50 Years!

One of the benefits of running Atomic Kommie Comics™ is being able to do customized presents for birthdays, holidays, and joyous events like bridal and baby showers (and, at cost, yet)...
I was preparing items for one such baby shower whose invite had...unusual...suggestions for nursery decor gifts; aircraft, specifically fighter aircraft!
(The baby will be a boy, and his dad is in the Air National Guard!)
"No problem", we thought!
After all, Atomic Kommie Comics™ has a whole section on War: Past, Present, & Future™!
So, we planned several customized items, including a bib, newborn onesie, wall clock, and 12-month wall calendar, all with the required fighter theme!
However, a quick glance revealed a minor problem; while we had over a dozen covers with military aircraft, we had only nine with fighters! The others were bombers!
We needed twelve for the calendar!
A quick look thru the extensive Atomic Kommie Comics™ archives showed a whole set of classic comics we hadn't yet touched...Captain Steve Savage and his Jet Fighters!
BINGO!
We selected the three best covers and loaded them up to the calendar template to give us an even dozen images!
Problem solved!

After doing the baby's calendar, we decided to add all three Captain Steve Savage covers to our Korean Police Action kool kollectibles collection for the perusal (and purchase) of all you veterans, relatives of vets, and / or war comics fans!
With North Korea still rattling sabers at the rest of the world (at least when the Mid-East isn't exploding into the headlines), it seemed like the right time (just before the 4th of July!) to return Steve Savage to duty!

Get Steve Savage in your sights, before he gets his sights on you!

Reading Room WORLD OF FANTASY "Iron Hulk"

Just before it transformed into Marvel, Atlas Comics was heavy into sci-fi...

...and I'm talking more than the giant monsters like Googam that most people think of.

(Though they were pretty kool...)

This never-reprinted tale from Atlas' World of Fantasy #19 (1959), scripted by either Stan Lee or Larry Lieber, is cliched beyond belief.

The reason I'm re-presenting it is to showcase the lovely art by Joe Sinnott.

While most of you know Sinnott as one of the best inkers in the business, he was also a competent penciler as well.

Ironically, Joe didn't ink much of his own pencil work, since it was subcontracted by Vince Colletta's prolific studio for Charlton, Gold Key, and Dell and inked by Colletta!

Most of it was romance or movie/tv adaptations, so I'll be posting those tales on my other blogs, but I'll link to them here when I do.

Reading Room DAN HASTINGS "Enemy That Wouldn't Die!"

Previously, we showed you a one-off sci-fi story from the 1950s...

...which, it turns out, was a reworked tale from the 1940s!

This original version of the twice-told tale featured ongoing hero Dan Hastings and appeared in Dynamic's Dynamic Comics #20 (1946), illustrated by Ralph Mayo.

Such reuse of already-paid material was not uncommon for some of the smaller comic publishers and packagers.

Sometimes art was reused several times, with totally-rewritten dialogue and different characters, as was done in this case!

BTW, I covered Dan Hastings' history along with another story HERE.