Monday Mars Madness WAR COMICS "Greg Gilday and the Martians"

Perhaps the last thing readers of Dell's War Comics expected...

...was a series about an interplanetary war and a superhuman hero!

But that's what they got when this strip premiered in Dell's War Comics #2 (1940)!

In the Golden Age, creators, unrestrained by preconceptions, tried genre mash-ups we wouldn't dream of doing today, hoping to find a "hook" to grab readers!
Drawn (and probably written) by Richard Fletcher, this never-reprinted series only ran three chapters before disappearing despite the final strip ending with a caption promising more adventures!
Note: the Richard Fletcher who did this strip is not the Dick Fletcher who worked with Chester Gould before taking over as the artist on the Dick Tracy newspaper strip in 1977.
This guy is Richard Martin Fletcher.
The Dick Tracy artist was Richard E Fletcher and didn't begin his art career until after being discharged from the Army in 1945.

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Ray Bradbury's

Martian Chronicles

Are You Reading the Literary Sensation of Summer 2021?

Specifically, the never-reprinted all-original novel from over five decades ago...

... which combines the best of both the Caped Crusader's Silver Age comics and the legendary 1960s TV show in peerless prose?

If not, what do we have to do to convince you?

Now if that doesn't send you hurling headlong to at least take a look by clicking...

HERE

...you're not truly a Bat-Fan!

Space Force Saturdays INTERPLANETARY POLICE "Meteor Menace" Conclusion

We Have Already Seen...

SHE BLEW UP YANKEE STADIUM!!!

(Of course, it's actually Yankee Stadium II, but readers in 1952 didn't know that!)

The Space Siren, after destroying several Earth landmarks with meteors, demands Earth's surrender lest she rain fiery death upon the planet!

While the peacekeeping organization is called the "Interplanetary Police" in the first three tales, it becomes the "Interstellar Police" for the last two!
Writer Hobart Donovan was the writer for the Buster Brown radio show this comic was spun-off from.
He wrote all the stories in the comic book, from sci-fi to western to funny animal!
Donovan was married to actress June Foray, best known as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel!
Artist Ray Bailey began as an assistant to Milton Caniff on Terry and the Pirates and Male Call.
When Canniff left Terry and began Steve Canyon, Bailey went with him.
Finally going independent, Bailey launched several comic strips including the short-lived Vesta West, and Bruce Gentry, an aviation strip with sci-fi elements which was popular enough to have a 1940s movie serial based on it which features the first appearance of a flying saucer in the movies!
In the early 1950s, he was the artist on the Tom Corbett: Space Cadet newspaper strip at the same time he did the first two tales of this series!

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Taylor Illustrated History

Science Fiction Comics 

Friday Fun PUZZLE-FUN COMICS "Alec in FumbleLand: You Can Bank on It"

A couple of weeks ago we presented Alec's premiere adventure...

...now we present his second (and, sadly, final) tale, this one a lesson in personal finance!

Their banking system and procedures are incredibly-weird...even for comics created for a kid/pre-teen audience!

That point aside, the never-reprinted tale from George W Dougherty Publishing's Puzzle-Fun Comics #2 (1946) by sadly-neglected writer/artist George Carlson is beautifully-done, playing cleverly on the concepts of Lewis Carroll's books.

Carlson, who created and produced the amazing Jingle Jangle Tales for Eastern Color, was a book and slick magazine cartoonist illustrator who did comic books "on the side".

His only comic book work was Jingle Jangle Comics, this title, and a few one-pagers for Eastern Comics!

99% of his comic book output has never been reprinted.

Once we can assemble it, we're going to do a blogathon of his astounding work!

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Perfect Nonsense

Chaotic Comics and Goofy Gags of George Carlson

Reading Room RADIO BOY "Conclusion"

When Last We Left Our Tiny Robot Hero...

What do you do when giant monsters attack?

If you're the Electric Patrol, tasked with guarding the globe, you throw up your hands and call upon that tiny triumph of technology, Radio Boy!

Eclipse's never-reprinted Radio Boy #1 (1987) one-shot is loosely-based on Osamo Tesuka's Astro Boy, which had achieved success as a translated anime in the early 1960s and opened the door for a flood of Japanese cartoons on American TV that continues to this day.

Note: Though Astro Boy is best-known in the US as a tv cartoon series, it began as a wildly-successful manga in 1954.

The premise of Radio Boy is that the creator himself did the translations for this American edition, resulting in a mish-mash of syntax and tenses as well as some literal translations of Japanese phrases.

As a collector of foreign videos (including Japanese and Chinese DVDs), I can attest that the English subtitles on them often do read like the captions and copy in this spoof.

I suspect writers Chuck Dixon (yes, that Chuck Dixon) and Jim Engel had also seen some mis-translated films/videos, and wanted to re-create the experience on the printed page.

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Manga

the Complete Guide