This is the Pappy's fourth annual* July 8 celebration of flying saucers. Sixty-five years ago today the Roswell (New Mexico) Daily Record published its historic headline:
To commemorate the date I have a couple of flying saucer/UFO stories.
I was inspired to get out my copy of Dynamo #1 (1966) and scan the lead story by Dan Adkins and Wallace Wood based on this wonderful splash panel from Heritage Auctions. I lifted the scan from their website.
My favorite panel is Dynamo saying, "I bet I'm the first guy in history to knock down a space ship with a rock!" The story is full of action and the art is great.
The story, "Landing of the Flying Saucers!" is another zany story from Wonder Woman. Although the whole thing is wild—aliens shaped like skinny Michelin men with lollipop heads and antennae who use expressions like "Heee! Hooo!"—I give writer/editor Robert Kanigher and artist Harry G. Peter credit for originality. I even like the flying saucer, which, unlike most depictions of UFOs in those days doesn't look like it's made of sheet metal, and in fact doesn't look like anything mechanical.
It's an oddball story, something we've come to expect from this title. From Wonder Woman #68 (1954):
*Previous postings are from Pappy's #554, Pappy's #768, and Pappy's #978.
4 comments:
Here's an interesting tidbit tenuously connected to this post. On a recent episode of the animated series "Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes", we see Captain America a captive aboard a Skrull spaceship. The Captain uses archaic terms like "little green men" and "flying saucer", perhaps to remind us that he recently came of out many decades in suspended animation. The problem is that Cap went into the ice in 1945, and the term "flying saucer" wasn't coined until 1947.
Wood should have copyrighted that helmet design!
It's jarring to go from Wally Wood to the really archaic art in Wonder Woman. Even worse, the aliens plans: blow up every planet in the galaxy? That's 160 billion planets (at last estimate)! Even a low estimate is 50 billion! How much time are they going to spend on this?
TotalToyz, interesting observation. But you're right, it was some newspaperman who tagged that 1947 UFO flap as “flying saucers,” and it stuck.
Even more tenuously connected to the post, when I was in seventh grade my science teacher, Mr. Stooky, made jokes about “little Martin men” who come to Earth in flying saucers. It took me a while to realize he meant Martian, not Martin. It shook my faith in him. What else was he getting wrong in that classroom...?
Hey, Gumba, maybe the aliens don't have anything else to do but blow up planets. It's their raison d'etre.
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