Reading Room ALARMING TALES "Hero"

Here's a short (in more ways than one) space-opera tale...

...though you won't get the pun until the end...

This story of size and space travel from Harvey's Alarming Tales #2 (1957) was produced by writer Jack Oleck, and illustrator Marvin Stein (with what appears to be uncredited layout help by Jack Kirby).

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Science Fiction Comics
Taylor History of Comics
Vol 3

Monday Madness FANTASTIC COMICS "Space Smith and the Sinister Saturnians"

The round-robin of writers and artists on this series continues...

...with more unknown creatives taking a crack at the interplanetary hero!

This tale from Fox's Fantastic Comics #11 (1940) has never been reprinted.
Pity, because it's a prime example of "compressed storytelling" that, if done today, would be a 20-page book-lengther...if not a two-parter!

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Science Fiction Comics
Taylor History of Comics
Vol 3

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