Number 689

Fox's rocket guys and gals...

Here's the third installment of Pappy's Science Fiction Week, rocketship stories from Fox Feature Syndicate comics of the 1940s.

"Perisphere Payne" is early, from the last issue of Science Comics #8, 1940. The Perisphere was a landmark from the 1939 World's Fair, so the comic wanted to tie him in. Perisphere flies solo, unlike Rocket Kelly and Rick Evans, who are flying threesomes. In those two strips they are crowded into the coupé front seat of the rocket. I can imagine the poor chicks in the middle complaining, "You guys, if you don't watch your damn elbows..."

Not to mention there are no ladies rooms on the rocketships.

Rocket Kelly #1, copyright by Fox, was published by Larkin, Roosevelt and Larkin, Publishers, in 1944. It's probable the company had a paper ration in those war years, and Fox paid them to use it. In 1945, after rationing was lifted, Rocket Kelly lasted another five issues under the Fox imprint. The story itself is an odd mix of science fiction and theology, with Satan (called "Diablo") coming to earth. In the real world of 1944 lots of people thought the devil was loose with wars going on simultaneously in Europe and the Pacific.

Rick Evans is from Zoot Comics #8, from 1947, and gets my vote for worst-looking rocket crew helmets ever. Artist is listed as Stan Ford, as Ted Small is credited with Rocket Kelly and Arnold Hardy for Perisphere Payne. As with all Fox comics, I'm not vouching for the accuracy of those credits.

Number 688

Spirit of science fiction

I like Will Eisner's Spirit stories because they can be anything: detective, human interest, adventure, romance, film noir, fantasy or science fiction. Sometimes a combination of those elements. These stories, scanned from Police Comics #101 and #102, 1950, use science fiction as a sub-theme in the first (rocket to the moon as escape for a criminal), and the plot driver for the second (time travel). As usual, nothing in a Spirit story is strictly conventional. There are always surprises in the seven pages that fit outside normal expectations of 1940's comics.

We are in a science fiction week at Pappy's. Tomorrow, the Fox rocket men!

Number 687

The 10th @ Noon

I was one of those school kids from the 1950s who watched the U.S. government propaganda films of the "duck and cover" maneuver. Those films are now shown as jokey remnants of a more innocent time. We were told when an atomic attack was imminent we could hide under our school desks and they would protect us. We had drills to practice "duck and cover." Our government had the audacity to tell such lies to school kids. They knew after assessing the damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that there weren't any desks that would keep us from being vaporized by even a small nuclear weapon.

Stories about atom bombs and nuclear attacks were fairly common in science fiction of the day, including EC Comics. This story, from the February, 1952 Weird Fantasy #11, drawn by Wally Wood, is a good example. Wood later went on to draw "Atom Bomb" for Harvey Kurtzman in Two-Fisted Tales #33 in 1953.

As a culture we like to scare ourselves with imaginary creatures like werewolves and vampires, and the horror comic books of the same era took some heavy official heat. But for me at the time there wasn't anything as scary as the thought of Russian bombers dropping atom bombs on my city, and no one thought for a second how that might be affecting the kids.

I'm including scans of the dramatic original art for "The 10th At Noon" which I found years ago on the Internet, as well as scans from the 1990s reprint of Weird Fantasy #11 by Russ Cochran. How gorgeous is that splash panel? Talk about the stuff of nightmares...

This is the first of five consecutive Pappy posts featuring a science fiction theme. Sunday: The Spirit of science fiction.