Saturday, December 3, 2022

Space Hero Saturdays FANTASTIC COMICS "Space Smith Meets Skomah the Brain"

Writer/artist Fletcher Hanks created a number of surreal series during his too-brief (1939-41) comics career...
...but none was weirder than this series, which he started, but others (like Jack Kirby), continued for almost the entire run of Fantastic Comics!
Now, that was FANTASTIC, eh?
Some call Hanks the "Ed Wood of comics", but there's no mistaking the sheer imagination behind the primitive art.
When comic books featuring new material (they were initially comic strip reprints) first appeared in the late 1930s, it was an "anything goes" market as publishers would run whatever they could lay their hands on from both comic strip and pulp magazine professionals and talented (read "cheap") amateurs.
Some, like Siegel & Shuster, Simon & Kirby, and Finger & Kane created what would become American icons.
Others. like Fletcher Hanks, were like mayflies, briefly appearing...then disappearing, leaving little behind.
Even comics geeks had forgotten about Hanks' material, which sat un-reprinted for over half a century, until Fantagraphics produced a couple of books collecting his work from the various anthologies it appeared in!
Since then, his work has discovered a new audience, eager to enjoy his unrestrained lunacy, like this premiere tale from Fox's Fantastic Comics #1!
We'll be running the entire series once a month over the next year, including both Hanks' work and the later, more conventional tales by others.
Watch for them...
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Friday, December 2, 2022

Thursday, December 1, 2022

Reading Room ALARMING ADVENTURES "New Star"

Things aren't always what they seem...
...as this story, with a Twilight Zone-style ending proves!
Ah, the old "it's Earth and we didn't realize it!" trope!
Did artist Bob Powell also write this never-reprinted tale from Harvey's Alarming Adventures #2 (1962)?
His studio was supplying a lot of comics material to several different publishers, and even from his earliest work for Fox back in the late 1930s, Powell would sometimes write the stories as well!
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Wednesday, November 30, 2022

Wednesday World of Wonder ROBOTMEN OF THE LOST PLANET "Chapter Three: Rise of the Humans!"

When Last We Left What Remains of Humanity...

Don't you love it when the story synopsizes itself?
(Note that inside front cover illustrator Mort Lawrence did an excellent job matching story artist Gene Fawcette's art style!)
So there's at least one universe where we don't end up enslaved by machines!
Yay!
This 1952 one-shot title from Avon Comics was scripted by Walter (The Shadow) Gibson and rendered by Gene Fawcette.
Avon did an amazing amount of one-time-only titles, probably more than any other publisher.
Some were adaptations of novels Avon's paperback division had published, like An Earth Man on Venus.
Others, like RobotMen, were original stories.

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Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Reading Room MYSTICAL TALES "Endless Search"

It's said that artists see things not as they are, but as they should be..
...a concept Cedric Chalmers inadvertantly discovers in this never-reprinted story from Atlas' Mystical Tales #1 (1956)!
Despite its' title, the short-lived Mystical Tales was actually a sci-fi/science-fantasy anthology.
To this day, almost none of the tales have been reprinted, despite being rendered by a number of well-known artists like Joe Orlando (who did this story), Bob Powell, Reed Crandall, Bill Everett, and Bernie Krigstein!
The writers for almost all of the stories, however, are unknown.
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