Number 2574: Bullet-heads from outer space

What would the world — including America — do without Spurs Jackson and his Space Vigilantes? When it comes to Spurs Jackson and his fellow cowpokes on the ranch, they keep running up against creatures and characters from space. You know Spurs and friends are the good guys because they shoot straight whether their adversaries be local or from other planets.

Walter Gibson, who made his living for years churning out two Shadow novels a month for The Shadow pulp magazine, created Space Western. He wrote the story I am showing today. Here's hoping Gibson didn't get ripped off. (After all, “the Shadow knows!”) I believe that Charlton was a shoestring operation, and it looks to me that over the years they did most of their comic books on the cheap. That is my opinion, of course.

Stan Campbell did the artwork, and he did a good job mixing the old West scenarios with drawings of flying saucers, and in this story, creatures with bullet heads and long fangs. It is from Space Western Comics #41 (1952).

Number 2564: The Yellowjacket, bees, and a short history of Charlton comics

The blog TV Tropes, in an undated entry, gives a short history of Charlton, a low budget printer/publisher. Charlton’s printing presses had been used originally to print cereal boxes. Charlton cut corners by using plastic printing plates rather than standard metal plates. It operated on the cheap for its whole existence from 1935 to 1986, when it finally shut its doors (and retired its overworked printing presses.) Wikipedia describes the origin of the business by telling that John Santangelo Jr and Ed Levy met while in prison. Santangelo had been publishing song-lyric magazines, violating copyrights, and was sentenced to a year in prison. Levy was a lawyer, whose crime is not listed. They both had sons named Charles, which created their first company name, T.W.O. Charles Company, later changed to Charlton.

Charlton went into comic books in the '40s, and published Yellowjacket Comics, which featured an unusual hero, Yellowjacket, who could get bees to help him. Note: Yellowjacket was beaten to comic books by Red Bee, from Quality Comics. Also, as has been pointed out, a yellowjacket is not a bee, but a yellowjacket costume was bright yellow, and looked better in comic books printed using plastic printing plates.

From Yellowjacket Comics #5 (1945). Artwork, pencils only, attributed by the Grand Comics Database to Ken Battefield.

Number 2556: “Feed me, Seymore!”

Artist Tom Sutton might have used Little Shop of Horrors as the springboard for “A Budding Evil,” which he wrote and drew. That is the original version of the movie, and not the remake, which would not be made for ten years from the time of the story’s publication. That aside, the comic book story is a six page horror story from Charlton, only without real horror, unless big scary plants give you the shivers. I would appreciate looking at a ghastly corpse or two. (I am effectively housebound except for trips for groceries, or a walk with Mrs Pappy, and it has turned me into...what? A grumpy old comic book reader who needs the sight of blood to satisfy his homicidal thoughts.)

The indicia says this is from Charlton’s Haunted #35, with additional title added to the cover, Baron Weirwulf’s Haunted Library. It appears that Charlton changed the title of the comic book, but not officially, so it wasn’t necessary to pay the U.S. Postal Service for a new mailing permit. The comic book has no Comics Code badge on the cover, so I was hoping it would have an EC Comics-like scene. The indicia told me this was a reprint of a 1964 original printing, and I guess that printing had the old familiar Code approval.

P.S. “Homicidal thoughts” is just a joke, you know. Ha. Ha. No need to call the police.
 

Number 2468: Into the catacombs you dirty rat!

“A Lovely Night in Paris” is far from lovely. It is a horror story where a woman gets kidnapped by some little red monsters and taken deep into the catacombs of Paris. It is a love story in the making, as a handsome gendarme follows her and her captors underground.

Joe Gill wrote the story, and Tom Sutton drew it. Despite the artwork seeming rushed it is very dynamic: deep shadows, monsters, a beautiful woman and a brave gendarme.

And it has a bondage cover. I am only a bit surprised that the Comics Code let that go by. It had been 20 years since all of the foofaraw over comic books brought on the Code. At some point in the '70s the Code started to lighten up by approving comics they would not have approved in the past. Comic book buyers were getting older, and I have also heard the Code became relaxed because of television, and how much sex, violence and swearing was allowed by TV network censors. By then nobody in the larger outside world cared what happened in comic books.

Back to this comic book. The story is from Ghostly Haunts and was originally published in 1974 by Charlton. This edition was published in 1978 by a promotional company called Modern Comics. I read they were reprinted to be sold three to a bag. In the '70s I bought some Modern Comics one at a time (no bag) from an F.W. Woolworth store. Woolworth is now out of business, as is Modern, but I assume one had nothing to do with the other.

From Ghostly Haunts #41 (1978 reprint of 1974 issue):

Number 2456: Space cowboys to the rescue!

I love an oddball comic. Space Western took two popular genres, cowboys and science fiction, and blended them. The numbering of the series, which lasted 6 issues, came from Charlton’s Cowboy Western.

The series was created by Walter Gibson, who was also the writer of the long-running pulp magazine, The Shadow, writing as Maxwell Grant. And here I thought the stories of the Shadow were a stretch for credibility!

This story, from Space Western #41 (1952), by Walter Gibson and Stan Campbell, is full of the craziness for which Space Western is known. Intelligent cacti from Venus come to earth to get an atom bomb, which Spurs and his gang are supposed to guard. You have a notion of how such a story will go when it is based on such a premise.

More Spurs! Just click on the thumbnail.

Number 2450: Beatin' on Beatniks

Going through my mental files and asking myself a question. What do I know about beatniks, who had an image problem in the late '50s, early '60s? I don’t know much. Just a Roger Corman movie, Bucket of Blood, cartoons about beatniks in mainstream magazines, Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver) in the TV comedy, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, “Howl,” a poem by Allen Ginsburg; also City Lights Bookstore and the Jack Kerouac books I read over 50 years ago. I admit I didn’t pay much attention during the beat era to stories about beatniks that were not bent toward ridicule by conservative America. The two stories I am showing today are examples of that.

Steve Ditko did this short story for Charlton’s Unusual Tales #29 (1961), a tale of square guy in love with a beatnik girl. I don’t think we saw enough of Ditko’s sense of humor over his long career, but this is an example.

Cool Cat was from Prize Comics, and lasted all of three issues. This story is from the first issue (1962). It is written and drawn by Jack O'Brien, who also created, wrote and drew G.I. Juniors for Harvey Comics, and perhaps thousands of gag cartoons that popped up in joke books of the era. O’Brien is also known as a cartoonist whose career supposedly ended in 1970 when he was arrested and went to prison on obscenity charges. Knowing that gave something of a new meaning to the Cool Cat cover: a guy with a smirk on his face, parked in a lonely spot with two girls...