COMIC READER "Invasion"

Here's a single image that conveys an entire story...

...a, sadly, never-completed tale meant for one of the Charlton sci-fi anthologies of the late Silver Age.

Probably abandoned when Jim Aparo joined editor Dick Giordano when he moved over to DC, it's typical of the detailed work Aparo produced for them, despite the awful printing that would obscure a lot of the time-intensive rendering.

The Comic Reader was a late 1960s-early 1970s newszine/fanzine, available at comic conventions and by subscription.

The covers were almost always featured art exclusives, either pieces done to promote current projects (a Manhunter cover by Walt Simonson during the character's revival in Detective Comics) or unpublished work like this one that editor-publisher Paul Levitz felt deserved exposure to an appreciative audience!

Reading Room LEGEND OF "COMIC BOOK" McFIEND "Bella Button Caper"

You thought Golden Age characters SuperSnipe and "Comics" McCormick were fanboys?

They were mere dilettantes compared to this Bronze Age guy!

This origin story actually ran a year after the character's previous published appearance (shown HERE)!
Published in the final issue of DC's Plop! (#24 in 1976), neither story has ever been reprinted, but probably served as one of the inspirations for the 1990s DC character FanBoy!

"Bella Button" was based on NY Congresswoman Bella Abzug, famous for her kick-butt attitude.

Though Abzug never tried to do a "Seduction of the Innocent"-type purge of mass-market comics, she did influence government military comics in the 1970s, when she and fellow Congresscritters William Proxmire and Orrin Hatch urged PS Magazine to"tone down" the mag's female leads Connie and Bonnie to less-sexy imagery.

(PS Magazine was provided to tech/mechanical support personnel with info and updates about equipment in an easy-to-absorb comic format)

The duo had been played as cheesecake from the 1950s through the 1970s, targeting the male GIs.
But with an increase in female recruits for non-combat/support services after the Draft ended, the characters were redesigned more as "buddies" than "babes", since women were now also reading and utilizing the magazine!

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Bella Abzug
How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy...

Reading Room SPACE ACTION "Flight from Destruction"

Here's an apocalyptic tale of the future with a twist...

...direct from the Cold War!

(Considering it was published in 1952, that's not suprising!)

While the writer is unknown, the art for this tale from Ace's Space Action #3 (1952) is attributed to "Jim McLaughlin", who had a short-lived comics career doing work primarily for Ace!

After that publisher dropped comics in 1955 to concentrate on paperbacks, he did a couple of stories for Atlas/Marvel, then a run of Dell's adaptation of the TV series Gunsmoke.

Then "Jim McLaughlin" disappeared.
Totally.
Unlike most comic book artists who went on to do commercial art or newspaper strips, there's no trace of "Jim McLaughlin" after his brief foray into four-color publishing...and no background about his pre-comics career!
Here's another interesting point...his art style altered considerably during his career.
In this story, the inking looks a lot like the work of long-time artist Jim Mooney!
In fact, a number of panels resemble Mooney's work on the DC strip Tommy Tomorrow, which Jim Mooney was both penciling and inking during the same period as "Jim McLaughlin's" work for Ace!
In McLaughlin's later work (particularly his Gunsmoke art), while the layouts look similar, the inking style is totally-different!
Was "Jim McLaughlin" a pen-name for a penciler working with at least two (if not more) different inkers?

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Reading Room MYSTICAL TALES "Man Who Saw Too Much!"

Here's one of those stories that make you scratch your head and ask...

..."what were they smoking/drinking/ingesting whan they created this?"

What's the "speed of time"?

How would it alter the composition of a piece of metal never designed to be played as a musical instrument by a human to allow it to be played. much less to transport the player through time?

Perhaps it's just as well we don't know who scripted this weird story!

The Grand Comics Database attributes Ed Winiarski as the sole artist for this never-reprinted story from Atlas' Mystical Tales #1 (1956), but there are clear aspects of long-time Atlas-Marvel artist Werner Roth's style in there as well.

Did he re-draw panels or did he pencil the entire story with Winarski just inking it?

So many questions, so few answers...

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Marvel Masterworks

Atlas-Era Journey into Mystery

Volume 1

Friday Fun REX DEXTER "To Mars...and Back Again!"

You may have noticed that the Friday Fun series features strips which have a distinctive "flavor"...

..usually attributable to a creative (writer, illustrator or writer-illustrator) who remains constant through the entire run!

Starting today, we're re-presenting another never-reprinted series with a unique style...Dick Briefer's Rex Dexter of Mars!

Remember the interplanetary rocket that took off during the New York World's Fair of 1939?

No?

Me neither.

But it occurred, because in 2000, this happened...

Wow, that's a helluva lot for only six pages in the back of Fox's Mystery Men Comics #1 (1939)!

Today, it'd be a four-issue mini-series!

Writer-artist Dick Briefer ended up creating a rather kool sci-fi character who became one of the longer-lasting strips of the Fox Comics line, lasting the entire run of Mystery Men Comics as well as his own one-shot title, and as one of the features in Victor Fox's proposed newspaper strip booklet (predating Will Eisner's Spirit inserts by a month or so in 1940).

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Comics About Cartoonists

Stories About the World's Oddest Profession