Sunday, November 1, 2020

Sean Connery (1930-2020) in Comics

Only one of the late, great Sean Connery's James Bond movies was adapted into comics...
...the first one, Doctor No!
Published in England as part of Gilberton's Classics Illustrated series, it was considered too lowbrow by the publisher's American editors.
They shopped it around to US publishers, almost all of whom passed on it...except DC Comics, who ran it (with Comics Code-approved changes) as part of their Showcase anthology comic!
Ironically, DC released the comic in January, 1963...but the movie wasn't in American theatres until May, 1963, by which point the bi-monthly comic was off the newsstands two issues and four months ago!
Remember, no internet, streaming video, DVD/BluRays, or even video cassettes at that time!
As you may have guessed, it sold poorly, and DC never picked up the option to do other James Bond movie comics...though their contract gave them the rights for a decade!
(Haven't you ever wondered why Gold Key, the leading movie-tv comic adaptor didn't do 007 comics?)
But that didn't mean Sean Connery (or his likeness) didn't appear in DC books!
In 1965, DC launched a futuristic spy series, Interplanetary Investigations in Mystery in Space.
Though the lead character, Jan Vern, was a typical blond, square-jawed comic hero (who looked in some panels like Robert Shaw, Connery's nemesis in From Russia with Love), supporting character Agent X aka Damos was a dead ringer for Sean...
Sadly, the never-reprinted series ran only two issues, but you, dear fan, can see them HERE and HERE!
(and, yes. both chapters feature Damos!)
In the early 1970s, Connery's appearance as Zed in the movie Zardoz...
...inspired (if that's the word) the look of a new Superman character...
...Vartox, a hero from another planet, who, after the misunderstanding on the cover of DC's Superman #281 (1974) was cleared up, became a staunch ally to the Man of Steel!
He's guest-starred ever since in various DC titles in basically the same outfit!
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Saturday, October 31, 2020

Space Force Saturdays SPACE SQUADRON "Last of the Martians"

Meet Mxxptrm!
No, not "Myxzptlk"!
You can't get rid of this guy by getting him to say his name backwards!
And, though he's a Martian, he's neither little, nor green!
An interesting aspect of Space Squadron was that, unlike Speed Carter's Space Sentinels, the Squadron had members from every allied world, not just Earth.
"Max", who debuts here, becomes a valued (albeit temperamental) teammate, rather like Worf on Star Trek: the Next Generation.
Art from this never-reprinted final story from Atlas' Space Squadron #1 (1951) is by George Tuska who later became the final artist on the original Buck Rogers comic strip (1959-67) and then assumed the art duties for almost a decade on Marvel's Invincible Iron Man!

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Friday, October 30, 2020

Friday Fun / Humor in a Jugular Vein "Blechhula!" & "Night Gawker"

Here's two creepy classics from the 1970s that should've been comic books, but weren't!

...as presented in our "brother" RetroBlog specializing in TV/movie/radio comics, Secret Sanctum of Captain Video!
Both were satirized in never-reprinted strips from Marvel's short-lived humor comics Spoof and ARRRGH!
Blacula never made it to comics, but Night Stalker has appeared under the Moonstone banner since 2002.

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Thursday, October 29, 2020

Reading Room / Halloween Horror UNCANNY TALES "Witch in the Woods"

 Since we posted a story about people blaming horror comic books for all the world's evils...

...we thought we'd run another tale by the same writer from the same period!
As Stan Lee's somewhat snarky script for this story from Atlas' Menace #7 (1953) points out, those beloved fairy tales were as mind-rotting as the comics Wertham and the others hypocritically tried to ban!
Joe Sinnott's clean and elegant renderings keep the story from being too grotesque, helping to sell Lee's point without the extreme gore some other publishers of the period (and even Atlas itself) occasionally went for!
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Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Wednesday Worlds of Wonder LOST WORLD "Underground Ambush"

We Have Already Seen...

...do we really have to add anything?
BTW, if you want to see the earlier chapters, go HERE!
The Excitement Continues...
Next Wednesday!
Writer "Thorncliffe Herrick" and artist Graham Ingels don't identify where this story takes place during this tale from Fiction House's Planet Comics #28 (1943), so we don't know what direction they're going!
They could be in Canada or Mexico for all we know...

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(which reprints this tale)