Apes vs Aliens

Apes vs humans is so 1970s!

Why did no one think of doing this sooner?

And why did no one think of putting it on t-shirts, mugs, and other goodies until now?

Reading Room: WEIRD TALES OF THE FUTURE "Flight into the Future"

"Jobs were scarce after the Great Atom Bomb War..."

They wrote that in 1952!
We haven't had an atomic war...yet.
But good jobs are still scarce in 2014!

The inimitable illustration style of Basil Wolverton just oozes from every panel of this tawdry tale from Key Publications' anthology Weird Tales of the Future #2 (1952).

And, the odds are he wrote the story as well.

Wotta guy!

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

"Theatre THREE is Transformers? Not Theatre TWO? Damn dirty multiplexes!"

As you may have guessed, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes opens today.
There's been a goodly amount of 'Net chat about how this variation of the concept works (and doesn't work), and if this reboot will do for Apes what the "soft reboot" (which deliberately made the new version an "alternate timeline" from the original) of Star Trek did for that equally-long running property.
(Actually, Trek is a couple of years older! "The Cage" was shot in 1964 as opposed to 1967 for the first Apes film. Oh, let my geek flag fly!)
Personally, I'm willing to see where it goes.

Before the Dawn...there was the Battle!

Looking over the trailers for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes...

...I was struck by how similar a lot of the concepts were to the classic series' final entry...

...so we're re-presenting the never-reprinted color comics adaptation of Battle of the Planet of the Apes at our brother RetroBlog, Secret Sanctum of Captain Video!

Reading Room: SPACE ADVENTURES "Horrible Enemy"

I was going to run the cover-featured Steve Ditko story about the "Menace of Magneto"...

...but then I saw the tale plugged by the vignette at the bottom of the cover!

This never-reprinted tale from Charlton's Space Adventures V2N5 (1969) looks like manga, but it's not!

It's "manhwa"...Korean comics!

The art for this cliched Joe Gill-scripted story is by noted Korean artist Sanho Kim, in his second story for Charlton.

Sanho Kim (or Kim San-ho) was already an acclaimed writer/artist in South Korea before coming to the US in 1964.

Illustrating a wide variety of genres including romance, horror, war, and martial arts, Sanho worked primarily for Charlton, with occasional work for Warren (where he also wrote the tales he illustrated), Marvel, and Skywald, totaling several hundred stories.

Sanho returned to South Korea in 1996 and continues to write and illustrate at the age of 75.

He received the Order of Cultural Merit (much like the Kennedy Center Honors in America) in 2008.

You can read a gothic romance tale he illustrated in the 1970s for Charlton HERE.