Number 2448: The Man from Planet X

Pappy readers: this will be the last of my Sunday posts. On Monday, September 7, 2020, I will begin posting each week on Monday and Wednesday. As in the past, I will go back to shorter stories for this blog. 

Now on with our regular business:

Fawcett made a one-shot movie comic out of The Man from Planet X. I looked up information on the 1951 movie, and here are a couple of quotes from review by an IMDb contributor, jayraskin1:

“The fact that it was shot in six days on a budget of $43,000 makes it more amazing. Compare that to The Thing From Another World ($1.6 million) or The Day The Earth Stood Still ($1.2 million). While none of the technical aspects come near those two movies, the movie does have an interesting style and look that foreshadows the 1953 classic Invaders From Mars and even has elements from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

“What really carries the film is Edgar Ulmer's energetic direction. Ulmer (Black Cat, The Strange Woman and Detour) always keeps the viewer on their toes, inserting off-beat and unexpected material in nearly every scene.”

The review’s author ends it by stating, “It is a must for film history buffs and others will find it engagingly silly.”

Although they made the “engagingly silly” movie in six days, I am sure it took a lot longer to complete the comic book version. In 2012 I showed the UK version of the same comic, which was printed sans color. You can see it by going to the link below and you can read who the artists were said to be.

In 2012 I showed the black and white UK version of the Fawcett comic. Just click on the thumbnail.

Number 2447: Babe #1: “This sounds more like a comic book than real life”

I have shown several stories of the voluptuous Babe by Boody Rogers. Babe was sometimes known as “Darling of the Hills,” yet on the cover of issue number one she is called “Amazon of the Ozarks.” Babe is a take-off on Al Capp’s L’il Abner, but while the Babe stories were often bizarre, they were without the savage satire Capp often used in his strip. The Babe comic books portray a poverty stricken area of America, like Capp’s Dogpatch. There are lots of people in shabby clothes, living in shacks. Would that stuff get by nowadays? I don’t know. The 1940s was a time of hillbilly humor in movies and literature.

Babe is also the best baseball pitcher in America. She can pitch, and the sequences where Rogers shows the various pitches and what happens as Babe batters the  batters is funny. Babe has an offer from a baseball scout to join the Blue Sox team, and the story takes off from there. Babe may come from the most humble of lifestyles, but she is beautiful, and also talented in sports.

According to Wikipedia, Boody Rogers retired from comic books in 1952, and went to Texas to open two art supply stores. Rogers had started his comics career by drawing for The Funnies from Dell, which began in 1929. Before creating the characters mostly known to us fans of old comic books, he had assisted Zack Mosley on the newspaper strip, Smilin' Jack. After his long history at a drawing board, maybe it was time for him to retire.

From Babe #1 (1948):

More bizarre Boody. Just click on the thumbnail.