Number 2359: Flying Saucers in the sky!

It was 72 years ago today, July 8, 1947, that The Roswell [New Mexico] Daily Record published its famous headline about the “captured flying saucer.” It was denied by the Air Force, the newspaper withdrew the story, and it went away for many years only to return a few decades later. It has now implanted itself in our consciousness.

I love the stories as much as anyone, and have been fascinated by UFOs since I was a kid, but I am not ready to declare any of those stories to be the absolute truth. It is the skeptic in me. But I think putting a flying saucer (as we called those unidentified flying objects in those days) on a magazine cover was a guarantee of sales. So it was with Charlton’s Space Adventures #6 (1954), which promised to tell of the “first contact” between humans and aliens from another planet. It has an attractive cover drawn by Stan Campbell; just made for attention on the comic book rack:

A young Dick Giordano, later both comic book artist and editor, in 1954 was about 21 years old by my reckoning. He did an excellent job with both pencils and inks on the story.

A major part of many legends surrounding UFOs is they are here for something we have on Earth: water, heavy metals, some people for medical exams...and this story says the well-spoken alien who talks to the two pilots is after something, also. And because we are humans and we like invasion stories, [oops! spoiler alert!] so the story ends just about the point where the 1962 gum cards, Mars Attacks! begin.*

As a final note, I do not know why the blue alien suddenly becomes comic book caucasian on the last page. A mistake by the colorist? A clever alien disguise?

*Click on the thumbnail to see the set of Mars Attacks! cards presented by Hairy Green Eyeball:

Number 1941: Ditko’s first superhero

In his blog, Toonopedia.com, the late Don Markstein asserted that Captain Atom was Steve Ditko’s first superhero, so Space Adventures #33 (1960) has some historical significance. I didn’t know that when I picked it from the comic book spinner at my local drug store in ’60. The historic significance might not have been evident to a friend of mine either a few years later. He was very enamored of Ditko’s Spider-Man, and was looking for other Ditko work. I am sure he is the one who got my copy of this comic, so the scans I am using for this presentation are those I found on the Internet. All I can say about that is, “Hey, Jimmy! I want my comic back!”

I know...not likely.

Also not likely is Captain Atom’s origin, which is just as silly as all of the other superhero origins, but involves nuclear bombs and radiation. In one panel Captain Atom explains he gets out of his civilian clothes and down to his Captain Atom uniform by burning off his top clothes with radiation. A nice touch is showing then-President Eisenhower as a character. Also unlikely would be putting a radioactive man in the same room as the President of the United States, and that falls on the scripter, Joe Gill.

Ditko left the strip, did Spider-Man for Marvel, then went back to Charlton where he revived the character. But despite Ditko’s involvement, Captain Atom was short-lived, and this version of the character was gone by 1967.

Come back on Sunday, September 11, for the first issue of Charlton’s Captain Atom.

Number 911


Giordano in space


When Dick Giordano died at age 77 on May 27, 2010, he left behind a legacy of comics work that stretched back to the early 1950s. Giordano had been a well-respected artist, inker and editor at both Charlton and DC over six decades, but at one time he was a 20-year-old artist working on various genres at Charlton. I have three science fiction stories drawn by him from Space Adventures #4, 5, and 6, all from 1953.

Charlton, always a notoriously low-paying publisher, at the time was using a lot of artists who didn't have quite the professional flair of artists for the larger comics houses. Giordano's work, compared to his later, slicker work, is bit rough around the edges, but has a lot of energy to it. It's obvious he enjoyed what he was doing.

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GOOD GRIEF! MORE OF THE JEEPERS GIRL!

I've found one more example of what I call the Jeepers girl, a corpse, swiped by different artists and found in various places about the history of Golden Age comics. For more Jeepers girls go to Pappy's #727 and Pappy's #788, which links to another blogger who has found over one dozen examples of the Jeepers girl on magazines and paperback books.

Number 606


No longer science fiction


Big news in 1952 was that George Jorgensen left America for Sweden and after sex reassignment surgery came back as Christine Jorgensen. This was hot stuff for the States, where alarmed Americans viewed the procedure skeptically, if not as a sure sign of impending apocalypse.

The popular media jumped right on the story and partial results can be seen in these two science fiction comic book stories. We have "Transformation" from Charlton's Space Adventures #7, 1953, and "There'll Be Some Changes Made," from Weird Science #14, 1952. "Transformation" is drawn by a young Dick Giordano, who can't match the skill of Wallace Wood, who drew "Changes." Despite the relative merits of the artwork the stories are silly. Even with sex change surgery being a reality, in order to create comic book stories they had to be science fiction. Maybe the public still didn't see it as real.

Scans for the Weird Science story are taken from the Gemstone reprint of the 1990s.