Writers and aspiring writers, take note if you have problems finding plots for your stories. Just steal. Or if you prefer, call it “homage.” Like this shorty from
My Greatest Adventure #24 (1958), written by a fan of author Daniel Defore. It saved a lot of trouble by just taking some incidents from Defoe’s work and transplanting them to a science fiction adventure. Not only that, but it created instant reader identification because
Robinson Crusoe is a work so well known it’s practically imprinted on our brains at birth.
I like the artwork by comic book journeyman Jim Mooney, and I got a kick out of the hero finding raw diamonds that look like cut stones lying on the ground. It may have had something to do with editor Jack Schiff telling Mooney to make it obvious to their young readers that the stone were actually diamonds, because the kids might not recognize them as such in their uncut form.
Perhaps the readers from in and around Arkansas (within which Carter of Diamonds State Park is located) wrote letters of objection about the state of the diamonds. [Insert cheap joke about literacy of people in and around Arkansas.]
ReplyDeleteAs a child, I would have fretted about the other crew-members of the wrecked merchant ship. To make me happy, there would have had to be some bit about the rest of them having been found alive shortly after the explosion. (I will blame the Sweets Company of America for the failure to report their salvation!)
That aside, I would have found this a scientifically silly but enjoyable story.
I think that Robinson Crusoe shows-up in pædagogy almost as often as do hot-dogs or widgets. And, when people ask me what the stock-market is going to do, I generally tell them that I presently work on the economics of Robinson Crusoe (decision-making by individuals viewed in isolation).