(Science Comics 004, 1940)
Cosmic Carson is a fairly generic space hero whose main distinction up to this point was that each issue he fought a different kind of alien with a cool species name (from Science Comics 001 and going forward: the Fang-Men of Jupiter, the Skull-Men and the Hoof-Men), but other than that he wasn't really of interest to us on this here blog. Until now, that is, because Science Comics 004 features a Cosmic Carson adventure illustrated and possibly written by the King himself, Jack Kirby.
So: Fort Roosevelt on Mars has been destroyed, and Cosmic Carson is convinced that it was the work of the space pirate Elramis. While hunting for her, he encounters a lone space-suited figure engaged in a firefight with what turns out to be a bunch of thought-controlled androids belonging to the Saturnian trader Iako which causes Iako to jump straight to the top of Carson's list of suspects.
While Carson gets some credit for working out the identity of the culprit about five minutes before Iako himself shows up to lay out his entire plan, he loses much more for failing to realize that the woman he had just been battling robots with was in fact Elramis, the original object of his investigations. Perhaps Mars is just the kind of place where that isn't a remarkable occurrence, but even so he might have checked.
Iako and Elramis have some sort of thing going on, but the nature of what exactly it is is not explored in the course of the story. The upshot of it, whatever it is, is that Elramis is left to her own devices once everyone is back on Iako's ship while Cosmic Carson is in for some sort of deathtrap, if Iako has anything to say about it. Thanks to a bit of psychological manipulation on Elramis' part, however, Carson is able to turn the tables on Iako in a very satisfying looking headlock.
Sadly there was no second instalment of this particular story so we will never know just why Elramis has taken over the ship or what the ultimate fate of Iako would be. Or, for that matter, why the colourist refused to colour the neck part of Elramis' spacesuit so that it didn't look like she had a weird seam under her jawline.
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