Number 2593: A key not to own, here in the Twilight Zone

Like my peers in the late '50s and early '60s, I watched television, everything everybody else watched. We watched Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Thriller, One Step Beyond, Outer Limits, and of course The Twilight Zone. Even if one had never watched the latter, today we know that the show’s title has taken on a meaning as part of our speech, “twilight zone” means to me an event that has a level of strangeness, not easily understood. Other definitions may vary, but people know it means something mysterious when they hear the phrase.

There was nothing new about such stories with O'Henry-style endings, but the musical theme and host Rod Serling’s dramatic openings to the the stories have stayed in the culture for decades now...60 years at least.

When I saw a Twilight Zone comic book I snapped it up. I showed this story from the Gold Key Twilight Zone #4 (1963) in 2007. It’s drawn by Alex Toth, and its ending fits into those stories enjoyed by the fans of the Twilight Zone and the genre.

Number 2228: Hanna-Barbera’s Addams Family

I am a fan of Charles Addams and the cartoons he drew for The New Yorker. I watched the sixties television show when it debuted, but had not heard of the 1973 Saturday morning cartoon series by Hanna-Barbera until I ran across the Gold Key Hanna-Barbera Addams Family comic book. What I found out is it’s an adaptation of the first episode of the Hanna-Barbera series. It is drawn by Bill Ziegler, a longtime comics professional who worked on comic strips (Mary Worth, for one), and had done a lot of work for Dell, then Gold Key.

Of course, animated cartoons made for Saturday morning television will never have the insinuation of the bizarre and horrible like Addams’s originals.

I am glad he chose to show the scene before the action, rather than after.
Something I noticed immediately in the comic book is the officer at the toll booth is a caricature of Addams. Addams had a very distinctive long nose. It tells me artist Ziegler may have known Addams.

To me this comic book is more of a curiosity, although if I were a youngster watching the animated series I probably wouldn’t know Charles Addams’s work. And despite the lightened tone of the comic book, removing it far from its original inspiration, Addams didn’t have any problems signing the checks he got for projects like this. He led a lifestyle of the rich and famous, even though he was not especially rich, just (in)famous. Having a collection of rare sports cars and hanging out with folks like Jackie Kennedy took a lot of $$$.

From Hanna-Barbera The Addams Family #2 (1975):

Pappy’s Sunday Supplement #8: Dan Spiegle and the land beneath the sea

Comic artist Dan Spiegle died on January 28, 2017, at age 96. He had begun his career by drawing the newspaper comic strip, Hopalong Cassidy, and when that ended in the mid-fifties he went to work for Western Publishing, doing comic books under the Dell and later Gold Key colophons. When Western closed its comics line Spiegle went on, working a lot with writer/creator Mark Evanier. Spiegle was a true professional, whose work is seen in many of Dell’s titles licensed from TV, especially Westerns.

You can read an interview done with Spiegle in 1972, from Graphic Story Magazine. See the link below.

Captain Venture only appeared in two issues in the sixties. The feature was a back-up for Spiegle’s Lost in Space. I showed issue number 1 in 2013, and I also have a link for that below. Unlike the first issue, which was made up of reprints from Lost in Space, the second issue is an original story. It borrows a bit from H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau. I say if you are going to swipe plots or story ideas, swipe from the best.

From Captain Venture and the Land Beneath the Sea #2 (1969). Written by Gaylord Dubois.

Graphic Story World interview with Dan Spiegle

Here is the first issue of Captain Venture. Just click on the thumbnail.