Reading Room ALIEN WORLDS "Collector's Item"

With eBay, Amazon, and others on the 'Net, it's hard for fans today to perceive when it was a real achievement to track down a...

...like the final card in a set it took months to complete!

Written by Bruce Jones and illustrated with some kool pseudo-Mars Attacks! card graphics by Ken Steacy, this tale of trading cards and terror from Eclipse's anthology Alien Worlds #8 (1984) perfectly captures the obsessive-collector mindset all of us suffer from at one point or another during our FIAWOL (Fandom is a Way of Life) period.

Reading Room OUT OF THIS WORLD "Man-Eating Lizards"

It's fun to see early work by a talent who would become one of the all-time greats...

...like this rarely-seen work by a then-teenaged Joe Kubert!

Note: may be NSFW due to racial stereotypes common to the era.

Oddly, the Pacific Islanders are colored green in this tale from Avon's Out of This World (1950) one-shot.

But when this story appeared several years earlier in Avon's Eerie Comics #1 (1947), they were various shades of brown and tan...

There's no explanation for the change to the coloring, especially since all the other color elements remained the same in both versions!

While artist Joe Kubert went on to become one of the icons of graphic storytelling, writer Edward Bellin disappeared from comics after scripting just this and one other story...which also appeared in that issue of Eerie Comics.

But that's not the end of the story!

Bellin (actually "Edward J Bellin") was an early pen-name for a writer already well-established in science-fiction/fantasy...Cyril M. Kornbluth...who was looking to expand beyond the prose market into other media, including comics, radio, and television.

Kornbluth had used the name on one of his earliest short stories, "No Place to Go", and decided to reuse it years later for his comics work.

Who sez comics ain't educational?

Before Rocket Raccoon, there was ROCKET REX!

Long before Rocket Raccoon, there was...

Take a handsome hero, a helpless heroine, a sinister villain, add spaceships and ray guns and, you've got classic 1940s-50s sci-fi action!
Except everyone's an anthropomorphic animal!

This never-reprinted story from Vic Verity Magazine #7 (1946) was obviously the first episode of a projected series.

Unfortunately, it appeared in the last magazine the short-lived Don Fortune Publishing ever produced!

Both the writer and artist are, at this point, unknown.

But the other stories in the comic were the work of CC Beck, Otto Binder, and others who worked on the Fawcett Comics line, so the odds are that the writer and artist for Rocket Rex are also from that ensenble.

Reading Room MYSTICAL TALES "Lair of the Thunder Lizard"

I don't usually run unrelated stories from the same anthology two days in a row...

...but this piece just begged to be unearthed for the first time in almost 60 years...

Scripted by Carl Wessler and rendered by Bernie Krigstein, this never-reprinted piece from Atlas' Mystical Tales #8 (1957) is a low-key character study enhanced by Krigstein's naturalistic art.

Bernie was already phasing out of comics and into mainstream commercial art (including book and magazine illustration).

This tale was one of his last stories before leaving the comics field altogether.

Reading Room MYSTICAL TALES "Endless Search"

It's said that artists see things not as they are, but as they should be..

...a concept Cedric Chalmers indavertantly discovers in this never-reprinted story from Atlas' Mystical Tales #1 (1956)!

Despite its' title, the short-lived Mystical Tales was actually a sci-fi/science-fantasy anthology.

To this day, almost none of the tales have been reprinted, despite being rendered by a number of well-known artists like Joe Orlando (who did this story), Bob Powell, Reed Crandall, Bill Everett, and Bernie Krigstein!

The writers for almost all of the stories, however, are unknown.