Reading Room SIR LEO "Thing from the Lake"

For Halloween, we're presenting the 1970s adventures of...

...a Victorian monster-hunter done in a wild, semi-psychedelic style by Jose Bea (The pen-name for writer/illustrator Jose Maria Bea Font).

You'll find out if a lead projectile will stop the creature (and if it doesn't...what will?) in our next exciting entry!

This first part of a two-part tale from Dracula #1 (1971) was co-written by Luis Vigil.
The Sir Leo series was published irregularly in Dracula (1971), a 12-issue partworks magazine* by Great Britain's New English Library, the first two Sir Leo tales made their American debut in Warren Publishing's HTF Dracula TPB in 1972 which reprinted #1-#6 of the British Dracula's run.
The remaining tales from #7-#12 have never been published in the US.
*Partworks magazines are a limited series issued from weekly, fortnightly, or monthly.
They usually run 12-24 issues for each volume.
When the final issue in a volume is published, the publishers offer a wraparound cover to make the complete set into a hardbound book. 
The buyer is offered the option to bind the magazines themselves or send the set to the publisher who professionally-binds the mags and sends the bound volume back to the customer.
This concept is extremely popular in Europe, but has never caught on in America, despite numerous attempts.

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Quest for Blood" Conclusion

We Have Already Seen...

...(actually we haven't seen this, since there's no scene like it in the book.

Nor is there a cloaked, sinisterly-snarling vampire!

But it's a great Neal Adams/Dick Giordano cover, eh?)

Escaping the scientific blood-suckers who inhabit the Dome in the center of a devastated Manhattan, our four surviving astronauts team up with the primitive, but human Street People.

Rigging a stolen aircraft as a booby-trap, they destroy two pursuing ships sent to recapture them.

There's only one more, never-reprinted issue of this series from 40 years ago, and you'll see it in a couple of weeks.

But the sci-fi scares continue...tomorrow!

Reading Room PLANET OF VAMPIRES "Quest for Blood" Part 1

In the 1970s, science fiction writers thought the 21st century was going to be rather dystopic...

...as this never-reprinted tale from Atlas' Planet of Vampires #2 (1975) demonstrates!

It's always fun to end a chapter with a BANG!

But LOTS more action awaits us...

...TOMORROW!

With the departure of writer/co-creator Larry Hama, John Albano (Jonah Hex) stepped in to the scripting slot, working off Hama's basic plot for the issue as well as several pages already laid out by penciler/co-creator Pat Broderick.

It'a a pretty good job, making the transition pretty seamless between the two writers.

Be here tomorrow, as the astronauts and street people take the fight back to the "domies"!

Trespassers Will Be EATEN!

Trick-or-Treaters Will be Licked! 

Whether you're a member of Team Jacob, or just love the fanged furry furies, go WEREWOLF this Halloween with our kool kollectibles including recyclable trick-or-treat bags, mini-buttons (great for bag stuffers and they don't rot teeth), magnets, mugs, yard signs and banners, and of course, shirts and hoodies!
Order now or you'll be baying at the moon with regret!

Best of Reading Room MAN O' MARS

Here's a kool klassic from the 1950s...the lead story from a 1953 one-shot that combined all the great cliches of space opera (spaceships, ray guns, aliens, half-naked space babes) in one tight ten-page tale...

These days, this story would be a six-issue mini-series with tie-ins to several other titles.

The rest of the book was made up of unrelated reprints from earlier issues of Planet Comics.
The interior artist is Maurice Gutwirth, but the writer is unknown.
The cover was done by Maurice Whitman, one of Fiction House's more prolific artists.