The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 301: Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #36, June 1963

The lead story in this comic, entitled "Dominant Species!", revolves around a rescue attempt by space marines of a stranded crew member on a hostile alien world. After a brutal battle, and after capturing the alien general, it is revealed that so much effort has gone into rescuing Officer Crandall because she's the only woman in the space army, and she's hot.

I'm not kidding.

The Sixties really were a different planet, weren't they?

This comic is a lovely (a qualified lovely, though) example of the sort of neutering comics underwent under the Comics Code Authority. I imagine if this had been published by early EC, there'd be much more blood and gore, and the twists and surprises would have been much more shocking. However, coming from the time it does, this one's fairly gentle with its stories. Only one, "Crew," really, actually produced a shiver, and I think it might make it into the next installment of "Giant Box of Comics Breaks the Law." A nice little piece of science fiction, and a couple of really chilling panels close to the end.

Aside from that, though, I've not much to say about the content. But, as I'm constantly saying, this comic goes to show that the dollar bin is a fantastic place to find the weirdest, most obscure titles. I'd never have picked this up if it was in better shape (even my old price guide says that a "fine" copy goes for about $12), but I'm glad to drop a buck for a look at a weird, horrendously sexist, but strangely vanilla piece of old school Sixties science fiction.

One last little bit from the dollar bin tomorrow, and then I think it's probably time to dig out some Christmas comics, at least for a couple of days. See you tomorrow.

The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 33: Shade, The Changing Man v.1 #8, August-September 1978

All things must end, I guess. At least, in a lot of ways, we have a decent closure here, which I was not expecting. Shade is tasked with another mission, and is still considered a traitor, but he has allies, and a deal to clear his name after another trip into the Zero Zone on the way to Earth to stop Dr. Z.Z. These are adventures that, sadly, we won't get to see, but this trip into the zone does manage to segue very nicely into Peter Milligan's run.

This issue, as the last one, is in large part exposition, this time filling in some of Shade's back story, specifically the story of how he gained the M-Vest. There's also quite a lot of cutting across the Zero Zone from Meta to Earth to witness the various scenes taking place in either zone. One of the lovely things about this issue is the transition panels that Ditko inserts where we have a snippet of dialogue from whichever zone we have just read and a snippet from the zone that the action is moving into, and in between there are bizarre illustrations of the inhabitants of the Zero Zone. Creepy and weird, a little trite, but nicely executed.

There's also a long-awaited reunion, which I won't spoil, since the series, if you can find a copy of it, is well worth a read. I'm glad I decided to take this detour into Ditko-Land. It was wild and wonderful, and I'm now looking forward to discovering some more of his work deeper in the collection (there's definitely some of his Charlton work kicking around in there) and to re-reading Peter Milligan's wonderful Vertigo take on Shade.

Shade shows up a few more times in the DCU and Vertigo Universes. For the ten year anniversary of Vertigo, Milligan and Mike Allred did a short Shade story based on the Vertigo version of the character. As I've mentioned before, the Ditko-Shade shows up in Suicide Squad in the 1980s, and then an interesting amalgam of the two makes an appearance in the Flashpoint crossover, and is catapulted into the New 52 DCU in the Milligan-penned Justice League Dark. None of these later appearances measure up to his original and re-visioned Vertigo iterations.

This Ditko run of Shade suffered, I think, in its resemblance to a superhero comic, which it most certainly isn't. There's no evidence that it takes place in the mainstream DCU, and had DC thought ahead here and changed the branding on the comic in order to show that it wasn't a superhero comic, it might have helped draw in readers. That said, the series still might not have survived the "DC Implosion," so perhaps branding is a moot point.

I wasn't sure what to read tomorrow. I don't think I'll move on to the Vertigo Shade yet. It's a 70-issue series, so I'd be reading it for few months. I'm not sure I'm up to it quite yet. In my database, Paul Pope's 100% is next in the reading order, but I'm not sure I'm ready right now to jump into so dense a work.

Here's a thought, though I'm not promising anything. If you're reading this, and I have irrefutable statistical proof that people are at the very least looking at the page, if not reading it, anyway, if you're reading this, and you have a suggestion of a series or character, or publisher, or decade, or genre, let me know, and I'll do my best to fulfill the suggestion from my collection. Again, I won't promise I'll do it every time, but once it a while it might be fun to get some public input.

See you tomorrow.

File Under: Things I Didn't Know About Alan Moore Comics

So, in making myself a list of the comics that comprise the America's Best Comics line, in order to have a more complete collection of them, of course, I found out something interesting about the Tom Strong series. In the 11th issue, we are introduced to "Terra Obscura", and it's science hero Tom Strange, an alternate version, we suppose, of the title character.

But the truth is a little stranger.

Tom "Doc" Strange, is actually a super-hero from a now-defunct Golden Age publisher called Nedor Comics. They operated from 1936 to 1956, and were apparently a rather prolific publisher. It's a reflection on my comparatively poor knowledge of comic book history that I had no idea who they were. So it turns out that all the characters on Terra Obscura were actually characters from Nedor Comics who had become public domain characters after their copyright ran out and no one renewed it.

Interestingly, the characters were revived by the publisher Americomics in the 1980s, a publisher that also published the Charlton characters before they were sold to DC. The Charlton characters were, of course, the inspiration for the heroes in Moore's Watchmen. The two revivals, written by the same man, though decades apart, couldn't be more (if you've forgive the pun) different. Where Watchmen is grim, and, let's face it, utterly brilliant, the Tom Strong and Terra Obscura stories are light-hearted, celebratory of the kind of heroes that were popular in the Golden Age. I suppose that the mark of a really great writer, that he can present two diametrically opposed views of the history of super-heroes, and still make them both completely compelling.

But enough. I could praise Alan Moore all day, and it would get us nowhere. Both Tom Strong and Terra Obscura are available in collected editions from DC Comics. And a far more insightful and complete look at these old heroes is presented at Nolan's Niche, at the CGC website.