Holiday Reading Room: EASTER WITH MOTHER GOOSE "Ten Little Easter Eggs"

Here's a perfect rhyme for the little ones...

...from the typewriter and brush of legendary comic creator Walt (Pogo) Kelly.

Published in Dell's Four Color Comics #103: Easter with Mother Goose (1946), this gentle little piece is a classic example of kid-friendly material rarely-seen today.
(And please, no politically-correct comments about the "Two little Easter eggs playing with a gun" rhyme.)

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Reading Room WEIRD WORLDS "Creature"

What happens when you take a 1950s comic story, and redo the art 20 years later...

...but re-use the original dialogue and captions?

With a script taken almost verbatim from the (then) 20 year-old tale "Lost Kingdom of Althala", this story from Eerie Publications' Weird Worlds V1N10 (1970) had a complete redo on the art by Argentine illustrator Oscar Fraga, whose work in the American comics market was exclusively for Eerie Publications and consisted solely of re-dos of 1950s stories!

Reading Room STRANGE WORLDS "Lost Kingdom of Athala"

It's Friday, time for a story that'd make a great "popcorn" movie!

It's hokey, doesn't make much sense, but boy, it's loaded with action and it looks great!

Written by Gardner Fox, penciled by Joe Orlando & Wally Wood, and inked by Wood, this fast-paced story from Avon's Strange Worlds #4 (1951), would make a great Saturday afternoon flick, thanks to current state-of-the-art special effects!

EXTRA: Here's the b/w inside cover for this issue, which featured an illustrated preview of the stories by Wally Wood.

Note the heavy use of "craftint" texturing which Wood used to create a distinctive "look" for his art...

The script was re-used, almost verbatim, in 1970 by Eerie Publications, but the artwork for the retelling was nowhere near as good.

You'll see that version tomorrow!

Holiday Reading Room MARVEL TALES "Louie's Leprechaun"

A never-reprinted tale about a leprechaun on St Patrick's Day?

Talk about yer pot o' gold, eh?

Written by Carl Wessler, and illustrated either by Vic Carabotta or the team of Arthur Peddy and Bernie Sachs (experts disagree on who did it), this story from Atlas' Marvel Tales #143 (1956) hasn't seen print in 60 years!

Considering the numerous illogical aspects to this tale (not the least of which was how the leprechaun mailed a letter minutes after he was sealed back in the ground, but before Louie got home only minutes later), it's not a bad story...if you don't think too hard about it.

And after a couple of pints of Guinness to celebrate the day, most of us won't...

Reading Room LOST WORLDS "Man Who Didn't Know Venus"

Nedor/Better/Standard Comics produced several sci-fi anthologies...

...none of which lasted more than three issues.

But it certainly wasn't due to lack of quality.

With a contributor list that included Alex Toth, Ross Andru, Mike Sekowsky, Nick Cardy, and Jack Katz, you're talking some of the great and soon-to-be-great storytellers of comics history!

But, there was one other sci-fi creator who did a story for Lost Worlds, one of only four tales he did for comic books.

Jerome Bixby, novelist and short-story writer, as well as screenwriter whose credits include...

IT! the Terror from Beyond Space!

Fantastic Voyage

Star Trek "Mirror, Mirror" and "Day of the Dove"

and the short story "It's a Good Life" which was adapted on both the original Twilight Zone tv series (by Rod Serling) and the 1983 feature film (adapted by Richard Matheson).

BTW, around the time he wrote this, Bixby had just left his position as editor of the Planet Stories pulp magazine at Fiction House, where he also contributed a couple of text pieces to Planet Comics and Indians (his only non-genre text story)!

BTW, let me know if this size is readable or not