Number 1591: Earth people good, space people bad

After surviving the shock of Wednesday’s post with the devious Earthmen preying on the innocents of another planet, we get back to fare we are more used to. When it comes to people who live on other planets we are xenophobic. We’re xenophobic with those who live on our own planet as well, but here we have alien stand-ins. Tradition in science fiction returns: we are the good guys, they are not.

The two stories today come from Avon’s Strange Worlds #7 (1952). Gene Fawcette signed “The Space Gods of Planetoid 50”, but the artist(s) of “Sabotage on Space Station 1” gets a “?” from the GCD.

This ends our week of skiffy stories.

More about →

Number 1546: The sexy slave girl

Considering the pulchritude of Malu, the slave girl of the book's title, you just know this book flew off the racks in 1949. It has a great cover with chesty Malu in a harem costume. This was hot stuff then, and it is hot stuff now.

So why then did this title only last two issues from Avon? I don’t know for sure, but the forces against comic books were gathering and there were some public burnings of comics. Maybe the publisher felt the heat from those fires. (Although a few years later in the early '50s Avon was right there with much maligned crime and horror comics, so at this late date who really knows.) I can picture a young guy looking at this comic in the drug store, thinking the title is provocative...she’s a beautiful, sexy girl...and she’s a slave girl so she has to do what her owner wants...oh hell yeah! “Hey, gimme a dime so I can buy a comic book!”

Malu lasted one more issue. Number 2 is re-titled Slave Girl Princess, with a less provocative cover. Maybe I’ll get around to showing that sometime.

Howard Larsen did the cover and first story of this issue, but the rest of the book looks like some other artists had their hands in.

More about →

Number 1517: Giant zombie and dead husband walking

I like these two pre-Code horror stories for various reasons. The first, “Was He Dead?” from Avon’s Eerie #3 (1951), is a murdered-spouse-returns-from-the-dead story. In a few days I will show a Graham Ingels story where I will expound further on this theme, but for now suffice it to say this is a not-untypical example of that type of horror comic story, with nice yet derivative art by Moe Marcus and Rocke Mastroserio. It’s derivative in that some panels are borrowed from the style of Johnny Craig and Craig’s dripping sweat, as well as some inking inspired by Wallace Wood. A big plus is it’s got a bikini-clad babe!

“The Walking Dead” appeared in Web of Evil #12 (1954), and the artist is unidentified. You’ll recognize immediately that it is a zombie story with a borrowed twist: the zombie is a giant because the story is inspired by King Kong. That classic movie was re-released to theaters in 1952 and was a big box office success all over again, so it was aped (ho-ho) by several comic book scripters. (See the link below today’s two stories.)

**********

More on the 1952 King Kong re-release in this posting from nearly two years ago:

More about →