Heaven help me, I looked forward to the 1950s issues of Planet Comics to see what the Gale Allen feature ended up like and boy oh boy do I regret it. It's one thing to only read comics from 1940, but seeing the improvements to the form after a decade or so makes it hard to go back. But I must soldier on!
Happy New Year!
Infographics:
A conceptual drawing of a spaceship and some speculative facts about space travel c.1940 (Planet Comics 009, 1940)
Ephemera:
This is a bit out of order seeing as I have a two week or so buffer of posts most of the time and I write the Notes bits as they occur to me, but a real theme that has emerged as I've read the 1940 issues of Planet Comics has been that Fiction house was just repurposing whole stories left and right, including ones that were written and drawn for characters from other comic book companies. To be clear, I don't think that this was a shady business practice or anything, just that the industry was still new and that almost every book was an anthology title that features were being shuffled in and out of constantly - it's no wonder that artists were left with finished stories that were no longer wanted from time to time - why not just slap a new name on the hero and publish it?
With that in mind, I am 100% confident in saying that this first Crash Parker story started life as a Cyclone story over at Quality Comics - the setup of colonizing a new planet after a space race and even the look of the evil Martian king are dead giveaways. Good news for fans of Cyclone, the character who appeared in 4 comics in 1940, I guess. (Planet Comics 009, 1940)
Honours:
American pilot Ted O'Neil is given an unspecified medal for bringing down an Axis superweapon. (Prize Comics 004, 1940)
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