It's Elementary! Sherlock Holmes Calendars are the Perfect Gifts!

The IDEAL gift for the hard-to-please Sherlockian or Baker Street Irregular in your life (or yourself)!

Sherlock Holmes: the Greatest Sleuth of All!™

Basil Rathbone IS Sherlock Holmes!™

Plus MANY, MANY MORE!

Classic comic book and pulp magazine covers plus movie posters and lobby cards, scanned from the originals and digitally-remastered and restored!
Perfect for office, dorm, or bedroom!
NOT available in stores, only on-line! Order now...before time runs out! ;-)

Reading Room CAPTAIN ROCKET "Monstroids of the Underworld"

The final (in more ways than one) Captain Rocket tale...

is not an outer space adventure, but an inner space one!

Wow!

We had an atomic war in 1962...and nobody told us?

And Cap's adventures take place eons (or many millions of years) from now?

Both writer and artist(s) of the never-reprinted final story from PL's Captain Rocket #1 (1951) are unknown to everyone, even the eagle-eyed crew at the Grand Comics Database.

Captain Rocket didn't have a second issue, and the character never reappeared, though his name has been used for video games and halloween costumes!

Little is known about PL Publishing, one of the least successful comic publishers in history, lasting less than a year and producing only eight titles, none of which ran more than three issues!

Happy 98th Birthday to Jack "King" Kirby!

"It is said that when Man reaches The Edge of the Universe, he'll find 'Jack Kirby' signed in the lower right-hand corner."

Reading Room CAPTAIN ROCKET "Meets the Mind Stealers"

As we pointed out yesterday...

There were three Captain Rocket stories in his one and only issue from the short-lived PL Publishing, but only two were comics!

The third was a text feature!

There are no traceable credits for either the cover (which omits Cap's usual, rather dorky, helmet in favor of a transparent one) nor the story.

And here's a weird note: Though this tale involves Saturnians, the little vignette in the upper left of the cover warns us..."We MUST prepare for an invasion from MARS!"

Since there are no Martians in either of the comic stories, was the tiny Cap head shot referring to the aliens in the text feature, who might have been written as Martians, but changed by the editor into Saturnians (perhaps because he felt Martians were too much of a cliche)?

Or was there another, unpublished, Captain Rocket tale that got bounced into the never-printed second issue?

The answers are lost in the mists of time...

Reading Room CAPTAIN ROCKET "Graveyard of the Rocketeers"

He's the one-shot hero whose name has been usurped by many others since...

...but this is the never-reprinted, original Captain Rocket!

The lead story of PL's Captain Rocket #1 (1951) tosses us right into the action with just a one-paragraph synopsis to introduce the character.
It's not bad, but nothing to rave about either.
Regrettably, both writer and artist(s) are unknown to everyone, even the eagle-eyed crew at the Grand Comics Database.
Cap would appear in two more stories, but only one was a comic!
Curious as to how that could be?
Find out his sensational secret...tomorrow!