Number 2554: Having the time of his life...or death

I like stories about time travel, aliens from other planets, dinosaurs, and Murphy Anderson’s artwork. So we have all of those elements in “The Cycle of Time.” A driver hits and kills a man with his car, some alien scientists land and claim they are from Alpha Centauri. The aliens and the hit-and-run driver then all go back in time.

Those alien “scientists” say that Alpha Centauri is “a solar system trillions of light years away from the Earth and the sun.” I looked it up: Alpha Centauri is a galaxy, not a solar system, and it is 4.367 light years away, not trillions. Some scientists, eh? At least they have a time machine. (Note: I neglected my homework. Go to the comments below and read the corrections for my errors about Alpha Centauri. Chagrined, but glad to be set straight. Pappy)

Artist Murphy Anderson was one of my favorite artists in DC Comics, and I liked his work on the series, Atomic Knights, in early '60s issues of DC’s Strange Adventures. During his career Anderson did a lot of science fiction, including a couple of stints as the “Buck Rogers” artist in newspapers.

There are no writing credits for “The Cycle of Time,” but Jerry Siegel was the editor, and a guess would be that he may have written some of the stories.

From Weird Thrillers #2 (1951):

Number 2062: Karen's bitter love

Trouble brewing. Karen meets Brad, a handsome guy who falls for her. So far so good. But Karen has a boyfriend-stealing sister, Enid, to whom she introduces Brad. Uh-oh. Karen even tells Enid she is bringing Brad home because, “I want him to meet you.” Why is Karen playing with fire, knowing her sister will make a play for Brad? Is she testing Brad’s love and devotion? Is she purposely sabotaging her relationship with Brad so she will be able to grow into an old, bitter women (hence, the title of the story), blaming her sister for ruining her life?

That’s all the amateur psychiatry I can muster for a six-page love story. The main selling feature for me with “Bitter Love” is Reed Crandall’s artwork. He draws Karen as pretty but demure, and Enid as gorgeous and sexy (the red hair and the plunging decolletage are clues). Beyond the artwork, the story follows the predictable patterns of comic book love, with Karen’s demureness and dignity winning out over hot sister’s hotness.

Illustrator Norman Saunders did the cover. From Cinderella Love #11 (actual #2, 1951):

Number 1763: “Another successful mission for the Perimeter Patrol!”

Henry Sharp, credited with drawing “The City of Light” for Ziff-Davis’ Amazing Adventures #6 (1952), went into television, and in the 1960s became the story editor for the hit show, The Wild, Wild West.* He was the only writer to have episodes in all four seasons of the series. There is an online, abridged article from Cinefantastique, where Sharp tells the story of his contribution to the hit show: “Story Editor Henry Sharp” by Craig Reid.

Henry was also a fine comic book artist, as evidenced by his work on this story, and a pair of stories for Strange Adventures I showed last year. See the link below.

*The Wild, Wild West owed a lot to the success of the James Bond movies, but I always thought of The Wild, Wild West as being a comic book on film. Like comics, it took fantastic concepts, action-filled science fiction plots, and incredible villains, just as comic books did. I thought it closer in tone to comic books than the spoof Batman TV series.

Henry Sharp drew these two stories for Julius Schwartz, which I showed last December.

Number 1526: Foul Powell

Bob Powell and his studio had such a recognizable style it is easy to spot their work, no matter the genre. Some of my favorite Powell stories are from the horror comics of the early '50s, where they drew some of the foulest monsters and creepiest characters in the comics. These two stories are from Ziff-Davis’ Eerie Adventures #1 (1951) (The only issue, title dropped to avoid legal trouble with Avon, who also published a comic called Eerie).

There should be some sort of award for understatement in “The Vampires from Venus.” Two brothers rescue a manlike creature from the swamp. The thing is fish-belly white and has cat eyes. One of the brothers says to the other, “Jake, there’s something weird about this guy.” (Hey! you think?!) Yet Jake replies, “Don’t be silly! He’s just a little shaken from the crash.” People in horror comics can be so damn dumb it’s no wonder horrors happen to them.

Number 1487: Ellery Queen’s chain letter

The literary character, Ellery Queen, created by Manfred Lee and Frederick Dannay, was a detective who solved mysteries using deductive logic. The books I remembered always featured one of those scenes where all the suspects were placed in a room and Ellery would expose the killer. It’s been many years since I read an Ellery Queen novel, but I can tell you they weren’t like this story from Ziff-Davis’s Ellery Queen #1 (1951).

The premise is fairly simple, involving those obnoxious chain letters, scams that used snail mail years ago, and then through e-mail. But the ending is one of those “What th — !?” denouements that defies explanation. It comes out of left field, that’s for certain.

Grand Comics Database doesn’t have any guesses on the artist, nor do I.

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Ellery Queen, played by actor Jim Hutton, had a 22-episode run as a TV series in the 1975-76 television season. I enjoyed the show except for one episode, “The Adventure of the Comic Book Crusader,” putting Ellery at odds with a nasty cartoonist played by Tom Bosley, who is doing an Ellery Queen comic book. The story is set in 1947.

I watched the episode again recently as part of a DVD set of the series, and my opinion of the episode had not changed. The producers hired some hack to do the supposed “comic book” artwork, and said hack just swiped Jack Kirby. And poorly. My thought now, as then, was why didn’t they just hire Jack?

Not only that, they swiped the Raquel Welch pose from One Million B.C. for the poster of “Lola the Jungle Princess.”

How hard would it have been for someone on staff to do a little research in the production of comics to call DC or Marvel and ask how original comic artwork looks? The story presents the artwork as being large, loose individual panels, put together into page form. Not only did they not do even the most elementary research, they didn’t even do much studying of actual comic books, or they’d know that speech balloons and lettering aren’t this amateurish. A real-life letterer who turned in a job like this would have been fired on his first day.

It shows how much this television episode bothered me that nearly 40 years later I’m still bothered. Maybe at the time it was originally aired it gave some industry pros a few laughs.

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I featured the other story from this comic some time ago. Just click on the thumbnail.