Number 1567: Tubby and the LIttle Men from Mars

Trust John Stanley to make a running joke out of the fifties fascination with flying saucers. Stanley made “little men” extra little so they could zip around and help Tubby without anyone spotting them. It led to an endless number of stories from Stanley’s inventive mind.

I have said before that Lulu, with the exception of her storytelling to Alvin, was usually grounded in the real world of little girls and boys. Or as real as any comic book characters can be, that is. Lulu and friends outwitted adults and each other, but unless I missed them there were no flying saucers in Lulu’s stories. Tubby had a life full of fantastic occurrences, ghosts, monsters, little men from Mars, which Tub took more-or-less for granted.

Several of the flying saucer stories are reprinted in Tubby and the Little Men from Mars, a Gold Key 64-page one-shot from 1964, from which I took my scans.

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Number 1562: Easter with Oswald and the prehistoric egg

It’s Easter Sunday, and so I scrambled to find a story with an Easter egg (ho-ho). Lame joke aside, I present this epic adventure of Oswald the Rabbit, his buddy Toby, and their adventures in a babeland inside the Earth, from Dell’s Four Color #143 (1947).

Sexy little cartoon girls in an all-female society were not what I was expecting in a kiddie comic from the 1940s, but the unexpected is to be expected in any comic book written by John Stanley. Stanley pulls out the stops in this story, extending the idea of a pretty young queen with the addition of an old queen, and even an old old queen. Stanley had one of the most inventive minds of any comics creator.

Art is by Dan Gormley, a prolific comic book artist about whom not much is known. At least we know what he looked like thanks to this photo from Frank Young’s Stanley Stories blog.

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