Reading Room SPACE MAN "Out Into Space" Part 1

Beginning: a long-lost space epic of a federation of alien worlds, cyborgs, a secret Earth defense force, and flying saucers...

...years before Star Trek, Six Million Dollar Man, or UFO were broadcast over the airwaves!

What...or who...is at the end of the corridor?

Find out...tomorrow!

With a real-life space program well under way, this book-length tale from Dell's Four Color Comics #1253 (1962) was an attempt to "update" the sort of space opera popular with comic and pulp fans of the 1940s-50s like Speed Carter: SpaceMan and Space Squadron by setting it in the near-future instead of 50 or more years later.

Illustrated by Jack Sparling, who used the then-current Mercury astronauts' spacesuit designs, but Chesley Bonestell's already-outdated spacecraft concepts (probably because the finned ships looked cooler than the actual Atlas and Redstone rockets NASA used) as reference.

While the writer/series creator is unknown, he's believed to be Joe Gill who is credited for the later entries in what would turn out to be an eight-issue run.

It's Summertime! Refresh Yourself with Kooba Kola!

Wait a second...You CAN'T!
It doesn't exist!
(You can read the sordid tale of the soda that almost took the world by storm here!)

Now, you can't DRINK it, but you can WEAR it!
With Memorial Day weekend upon us, we at Atomic Kommie Comics™ decided to re-present the Soda That Would Not Die on collectibles ranging from BeachWear / NightShirts to mugs, iPad / netbook / messenger bags (and the irony of doing bags with "Kooba" on them hasn't escaped us!), iPhone cases, and hoodies at KoobaCola 1 and KoobaCola 2!
So celebrate what could have been one of the bubbliest success stories of soft drink entepreneurship, but instead just fizzled out and fell flat!
(You just knew we were gonna do a pun like that, didn't you?)  ;-)

Robin WIlliams (1951-2014)

He could've played it safe.
He could've just done schitck, and made an easy fortune.

Instead, he took creative chances no one else dared to do, like this...

"I yam what I yam" said it all for this one-of-a-kind talent.

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?