Reading Room STAR*REACH "A Nice Place to Live, But..."

Last year we presented a short about a Californian visting the Big Apple...

...now a New Yorker visits the Left Coast...

Frank Brunner's counterpoint to Linda Fite's piece in Big Apple Comics (1975) was probably meant to appear in that book, either side-by-side or back-to-back.

It's likely he missed the deadline due to his heavy workload at Marvel!

Brunner's piece finally appeared (for the first and only time) in Star*Reach #5 (1976).
We're happy to present them together, as they were meant to be...

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the HTF Comic Classic...

Big Apple Comix

Reading Room ALIEN ENCOUNTERS "Great Outdoors"

At long last, we can scream..."It's summertime!"

And what's summer vacation without (at least once) camping out?

The two creators of this never-reprinted short from Eclipse's Alien Encounters #12 (1987) are relative unknowns.
Illustrator Doug Medved's comics credits are limited to this, another Alien Encounters, and an issue of Tales of Terror.
Writer Ruby's credits consist of scripting all three of Medved's art assignments as well as one by Graham Nolan in Alien Encounters.
A pity, since both Ruby and Doug showed a lot of unrealized potential.

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Mystery in Space

Pulp Fiction Library

(which contains only a couple of stories from this previously-listed volume)

He did some excellent painted work for Topps' Universal Monsters cards in the early 1990s, then disappeared.

Friday Fun REX DEXTER OF MARS "on the Planet of Peace"

Rex Dexter makes the cover of Fox's Mystery Men Comics for the second (and last) time...

with this absolutely spectacular Lou Fine cover featuring aliens who never appear in the series!

BTW, if the first panel above looks familiar, it was used as clip art for the Rex text story as well as this ad!

Rex knows those people are doomed in this story from Fox's Mystery Men Comics #9 (1940), but thinking God might deliver a miracle assuages his conscience.

Dick Briefer's little morality play is pretty dead-on!

We are a savage species, and others would do well to avoid us.

In post-WWII science fiction, a number of tales involve more advanced civilizations wanting to quarantine/isolate us from the rest of the universe until we can prove peaceful intentions.

Not surprisingly, sometimes we fail...

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Comics About Cartoonists

Stories About the World's Oddest Profession

Reading Room SPACE VOYAGERS "Four Faces of Death"

They ain't Don the Con's "Space Force"...

...but the Space Voyagers are still an amazing team of interstellar explorers making their "trippy" way through the universe!

Sadly, we won't find out what happened to the "twins", or the "real" Space Voyagers!

There were only five Space Voyagers tales by Robert Kanigher and Alex Nino, all of which saw print as backups in DC's short-lived 1970s title Rima the Jungle Girl...and none of which have ever been reprinted!

However, as of this post, we've re-presented the complete series on this blog and you can read them all just by clicking HERE!

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Satan's Tears

The Art of Alex Nino

Wednesday Worlds of What Th... SIDNEY MELLON'S THUNDERSKULL! "When Demons Do Clash!" Part 1

In the mid-1980s, almost anybody could get a b/w comic published...

...as this weird mixture of bad Stan Lee, Frank Miller and How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way demonstrates!

Let us pause, dear reader, because I'm sure you're wondering "WTF IS THIS CRAP?"

As we mentioned earlier, as the first wave of comics speculators went ape over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which was a parody of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns and Ronin) and similar b/w titles, newborn direct-sales/comics shop industry was swamped by an incredible amount of inexpensively-produced b/w comics hoping to get on the sales bandwagon.

A couple were excellent and survived transitioning into color comics.

The vast majority were god-awful, produced by sincere, but inept, young writers and artists who inadvertantly took the worst of influences past and present, put them into a mental blender, and produced some truly pathetic pap that now lays in landfill all over the planet.

And then there was Slave Labor Graphic's Sidney Mellon's ThunderSkull!.

The pulse-pounding introduction to this tantalizing tome explains who Sidney is and how he came to be...

...or does it tell the true story?
For the answer, you'll have to come back next Wednesday...
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Men of Tommorow
Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book
by Gerard Jones