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Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Number 1250: The visible Invisibility Helmet

This episode of Star Pirate immediately got my attention with that startling splash panel. Girl with open shirt and white bra being crucified! Yow. That's eye-catching. But nothing of the sort happens in the story.

The next thing that got my attention was the Invisibility Helmet. The idea is for the user to put on the helmet and disappear from human eyes. The problem is the helmet stays visible, so the wearer can be easily spotted. If I were the inventor of this device I wouldn't think it was quite ready for marketing.

Despite those observations I like this strip; Star Pirate is a fun feature that appeared in Planet Comics, and other episodes I have seen have early work by Murphy Anderson. Here Maurice Whitman is credited with the art. Whitman was one of those top notch art talents that Fiction House was blessed with.* The art usually made the book, because as is shown with this example, some of the stories have holes big enough to fly a spaceship through.

From Planet Comics #53 (1948):








*Go back to Sunday's posting of Pappy's #1248 for some great Fiction House art by Joe Doolin.

2 comments:

Brian Barnes said...

No time for shirts in the future!

You notice in these tales there's usually only two fates ever for sexy, evil women? Either they fall for the hero (every issue of AirBoy, it seems) or they get killed in a mildly ironic way.

I swear the writer's trying to tell us something about how his last date went :)

Pappy said...

I swear I can't think up anything to add to your assessment, Brian! You have a way of getting to the gist of it.

Thanks for writing.