Reading Room MYSTICAL TALES "On a Lonely Planet"

Can a sport unite alien cultures?

This never-reprinted story from Atlas' Mystical Tales #1 (1956) suggests an answer...

OK, it's an ethnocentric conceit that the aliens were playing something even remotely like baseball, but illustrator Bill Everett and the unknown writer still manage to "sell" it for four pages.

BTW, despite the title, Mystical Tales was an almost-totally "hard sci-fi" anthology!

Only a handful of stories from the anthology's 8-issue run have been reprinted, all in the 1970s, which makes even the reprints 40 years old!

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Atlas Era Tales of Suspense

Volume 1

Monday Mars Madness MAN O' MARS

Monday Madness is being replaced by Monday Mars Madness...

...as interest in Mars once more reaches a peak with NASA's Perseverance lander.

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 set only fifteen years from now...

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

The rest of Fiction House's Man O' Mars one-shot from 1953 was made up of unrelated reprints from earlier issues of Planet Comics.

The interior artist is Maurice Gutwirth, but the writer is unknown.

The original cover was done by Maurice Whitman, one of the Golden Age's more prolific artists with credits at almost every company of the era!

When the book was reprinted by IW Comics in 1958 from the original printing plates, the covers weren't included, so publisher Israel Waldman commissioned Angelo Torres...

...who created a superb Frank Frazetta-style cover, doing his fellow Fleagle Gang member proud!

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Mars in the Movies

A History

Reading Room BLAST-OFF "Little Earth"

This is a classic example of an unheralded gem by two graphic-story masters...

...that has been reprinted only once, and in a limited-edition trade paperback, so most of you have never seen it!

Oddly, the GCD lists it as penciled by Reed Crandall and inked by Al Williamson, but Teddy I at pencilink.blogspot.com reverses the credits!
Personally, I think both artists, in typical Fleagle Gang-style worked at both tasks in various panels.

The writer is Larry Ivie, who scripted several dozen stories for Marvel, DC, Tower, King, and Warren in the 1960s, and also published Monsters and Heroes, a competitor to Famous Monsters of Filmland!

According to the Kirby Museum, this story was intended for Harvey's never-published Race for the Moon #5 in 1958, but remained unused until 1965, when it ran in the Harvey one-shot anthology Blast-Off!

Space Force Saturdays SPEED CARTER "Jet-Men of Zurko"

Previously, Speed battled beings from the center of the Earth...

...now he battles self-propelled aliens from an unnamed star in this tale from Speed Carter: SpaceMan #4 (1954).

According to Marvel's writers, aliens are idiots who can be tricked by everything from photos of ancient ruins to comic book panels showing monsters or high-tech weaponry that doesn't really exist!
Remember the end of Fantastic Four #2 (1961) by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby?

Reed Richards showed cut-out comic book panels from Journey into Mystery and Strange Tales to the Skrull fleet commander stating the creatures and super-science weapons shown were real and ready to use against alien invaders!
(Of course, the idea that Jack Kirby could draw stuff that could scare the pants off hostile aliens does have a real appeal...)
And, I remember at least a couple of other pre-Silver Age Marvel stories with a similar concept, including one where movie special effects techs frightened aliens with fake robots from a sci-fi film they were shooting on location...
Written (as are all the Speed Carter stories) by Hank Chapman and illustrated by new artists Mike Sekowsky, Don Heck, and Jack Abel.

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Complete Adventures of Lucky Starr

by Isaac Asimov

(under the pen-name "Paul French")

Omnibus of ALL Six Space-Opera Sagas!

David Starr: Space Ranger, Pirates of the Asteroids, Oceans of Venus, Big Sun of Mercury, Moons of Jupiter, Rings of Saturn

Friday Fun MAD "Dr Seuss for the Digital Age"

With all the recent controversy about old Dr Seuss books...

...it's sad to remember there'll never be new ones like these, since the good Doctor passed 20 years ago!

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 The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss

A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel