Number 1206: Captain Science and the Flower of Death!

I showed “The Flower of Death,” a few years ago. I’m re-presenting it with new scans. What I said about it then was that it was a story I chased for years without knowing what it was. I’d seen it when I was very young, maybe six-years-old, at a friend’s house. Despite being surrounded by two very cool Wood and Orlando Captain Science stories, what I remembered about the comic book was the transition of flower to ape. People write me sometimes and ask if I can help them identify a story they remember, and without fail I can't. I can't even help myself. This was a story stuck in my memory for many years that I couldn't find, and then one day opened up Captain Science #5 and there it was. Eureka!

Except...it's not much of a story. Artwork is serviceable, credited by the Grand Comics Database in their question mark fashion as being by Bill Fraccio? and Vince Napoli? So they're not sure. I wondered about the clumsy transition panels (which look like photostats), flower to ape and ape to flower, and then I found the origin of it in a gasoline ad from a 1950 issue of Life. This is another of my discoveries in Life that later turned up in comic books.

I've also included a Captain Science story from the issue because I love this Joe Orlando-Wally Wood science fiction and so do you. These are my scans from the original comic, but the story is also included in the book Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction, edited by J. David Spurlock. It's a trade paperback available from Amazon.com, among other bookselling sites, and if you're fortunate, at your favorite local comic book shop.

From Captain Science #5, 1951:

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Number 1194: The springboard from space

If you have the magazine page in front of you, as I do, it's easy to see where the idea for the cover story of Captain Marvel Jr #114 (1952) came from.

An illustration for the Association of American Railroads provided the inspiration. My copy of the ad is from the April 28, 1947 issue of Life magazine.Ideas have to come from somewhere. I think this ad, which might have come from a stack of magazines at the writer's house, was a springboard for a story.

The Grand Comics Database credits Bud Thompson with the cover, and Joe Certa with pencils and inks on “The Train That Traveled Through Space.”

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Number 1186: Life goes to the funnies

For a magazine that didn't run gag cartoons (unlike other popular publications, Saturday Evening Post, Look and Colliers), Life ran many articles on cartoonists, cartooning, and comic strips. Here are some examples I've culled from issues published in 1945 and '46.

The public watched Skeezix grow up and go off to war in Frank King's "Gasoline Alley." This article from the Life issue of June 4, 1946, shows a sequence with returned soldiers Skeezix and Wilmer hiring their old sergeant.

"Miss Lace" was a strip done for the troops by Milton Caniff. The article in Life was promoting the book, Male Call, bringing the sexy Miss Lace to the general public shortly before the war with Japan ended. This article is from the issue dated June 8, 1945.

Al Capp may have been the most popular cartoonist in America at the time. Capp had one leg and a huge ego. He got a chance to be the star by telling his own story, "Li'l Abner" style. The excerpts are from the comic Capp produced for amputees returning from the war. The text article is a biography of Capp that reads like a typical puff piece. It tells us he worked for Ham Fisher on "Joe Palooka," but not that Fisher claimed Capp stole the idea of the hillbilly family from him. We also read in the article that Li'l Abner was based on a young Henry Fonda. This longer than usual article is from Life, June 24, 1946.

The end of the article segués nicely into the contest that made Basil Wolverton known (and notorious) around the world! He won the Draw Lena the Hyena contest. As far as I'm concerned the runners-up shown here aren't even in the same league as Wolverton, who won out of a field of 500,000 entries.

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