MOPSY "Taxes"

The average person's fear of April 15th hasn't changed in decades...

...as this page from Charlton's TV Teens #9 (1955) shows!

If the fashions seem a little dated for 1955, that's because this series consisted of reprints of 1940s newspaper strips along with several stories created for Mopsy's first comic book series in the late 1940s.

Creator Gladys Parker wrote and drew all Mopsy material without "ghosts" to help, and when she retired in 1965, the strip ended.

Parker passed away the following year.

Trivia: The filing deadline for individuals was March 1 in 1913 (the first year of a federal income tax), and was changed to March 15 in 1918 (inspiring many jokes about having to "beware the Ides of March"), then to April 15 in 1955.

Reading Room ALIEN ENCOUNTERS "Earth Invasion"

There's a twist ending to this alien invasion tale you won't see coming...

...if you're under 30!

I'm serious!

Ah, video arcades...

Kids today have no idea how important those darkened chambers filled with video consoles and pinball machines were to us in the pre-XBox/PlayStation/Nintendo days...and how much money we spent, quarter-by-quarter, in them!

Yeah, there's still Chuck E Cheese, Dave & Busters, and their ilk, but those are kiddie venues!

Written by Larry Shell and illustrated by Steve (Swamp Thing) Bissette, this never-reprinted tale from FantaCo's Alien Encounters one-shot (1981) captures the long-lost era perfectly.

Best of Reading Room SPACEHAWK "Creeping Death from Neptune"

How could you not want to read a story with a title like that?

Plus: story and art by the unique (to put it mildly) Basil Wolverton!

This premiere appearance from Novelty's Target Comics V1 N5 (1940), written and illustrated by Wolverton, was just the tip of the iceberg!
SpaceHawk "unmasked" a couple of issues later, but the legend was already well-established, and the fact he was a "mere" human who could take down aliens several times his size and strength only made him even more fearsome to his foes...

BTW, we're packing to make the move to a new home (almost double the size of our current digs), so some of the posts over the next two weeks (like this one) will be "Best of..." re-presentations mixed in with some new ones (like on Easter).
Things will be back to normal by the beginning of May.

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Reading Room: Flying Saucers x Four #4 "Impossible Spaceship"

The final version of the story doesn't even include the words "flying saucer" in the title...

...and the ship design itself is closer to Star Trek or 1960s Italian sci-fi like Planet of the Vampires (one of my all-time faves)...

Published in the back of Marvel's Strange Tales #101 (1962), this MadMan-era, never-reprinted, Don Heck-illustrated, Stan Lee-scripted tale was the final version of a Stan Lee plot involving sentient alien spacecraft first used in 1953 (HERE), then re-used in 1958 (HERE), and 1960 (HERE).

NOTE: Atlas had given way to Marvel several months earlier with Amazing Fantasy #15 (first Spider-Man) and Fantastic Four #1 in 1961.

(When Spider-Man received his own title a year later, the FF were cover-featured guest-stars!)

BTW, the cover feature for this issue was the introduction of the Human Torch's short-lived solo strip!

Weird Trivia: All four of the issues these stories originally appeared in had a number "1" in the issue numbering (21, 1, 11, 101)!

Reading Room: Flying Saucers x Four #3 "I Know the Secret of the Flying Saucer!"

Yesterday, Jack Kirby demonstrated why he was THE KING...

...now Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko shows us his unique approach to the same plot!

Presented in the back of Atlas' (later Marvel's) Tales of Suspense #11 (1960), this Stan Lee/Steve Ditko collaboration takes the twice-told tale (as we showed you HERE and HERE) and adds Ditko's more personal/less cosmic storytelling approach, playing up emotions of wonder and fear, taking the story closer to its' horror comic origins...but without the devouring of humans.

It's not better or worse, just different.

Tomorrow, the final version of the tale, from another Silver Age stalwart!