Showing posts with label Crash Parker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crash Parker. Show all posts

Saturday, August 1, 2026

ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 052

The aliens are very humanoid today. I hope that they are to your liking.

Cavemen:

There's no real explanation of why these cavemen are just chilling out in a cavern not a day's walk from an inhabited region of Africa, along with assorted mammoths and sabretooth tigers. They're just what Fantomah finds when she follows a river to its source to see why it has been contaminated and is killing those who drink from it. The answer: the cavemen killed a mammoth and just kind of lift it to rot in the water. Unusually, all of these prehistoric remnants are still there when Fantomah leaves, rather than being buried in a cave-in or exploded by a volcano as so frequently happens. (Jungle Comics 022, 1941)

Martians:


These very human-looking Martians at least have the good grace to have a weird history, as explained to Earthling Flint Baker: Hundreds of years earlier the Martian government had enacted a draconian Tough on Crime approach and thrown all of their criminals into an underground pit known as the Shaft of Death. However, due to a perpetual high wind rising from the depths, the Shaft of Death was actually a weird area of neutral buoyancy, allowing the criminals and their descendants to form an entire civilization that floats in midair.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this history is that the surface-dwelling Martians have no idea of what their ancestors did, and ignore Flint's warnings about an impending invasion from sub-Mars until it's  too late and the drilling machines are on their front doorsteps. Worry not, for everything works out in the end. The sub-Martians are defeated and the subjected to brain treatments to remove their "criminal tendencies" proving that while the surface Martians might have forgotten their history, they are still very much willing to go to moral extremes in the eradication of Crime. (Planet Comics 009, 1940)

Martians

These similarly-humanoid Martians from the same issue are much more straightforward evil conquerors out to hijack Uranus from its rightful human colonists. (Planet Comics 009, 1940)

Martians:

Finally, we have these still-humanoid-but-just-barely Martians encountered by junior space traveller Mitey Powers. These guys made me really excited when I saw them, as they represent a specific vision of what life on Mars might have looked like but which I frustratingly cannot find an image of due to the state of online image searching right now. 

Essentially, this Martian represents a speculative evolution of humanity as it would look it it evolved on Mars, with huge lungs and ears thanks to the thin atmosphere, spindly limbs due to lower gravity, big flat feet to navigate the loose sandy surface, etc (one of the reasons I wanted to find another example of this is that there are justifications for the trunk and telescopic eyes but I can't remember them). Very exciting to see these guys walking around and having a society rather than just standing around as an example of their anatomy.


Speaking of their society, here are a couple of bonus tidbits: these Martians learn in their sleep (but must sleep sitting up due to their bulbous upper torsos) and play Blitzball from Final Fantasy X. (Superworld Comics 002, 1940) 

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

NOTES - JANUARY 2025

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)

Names:

The third case tackled by Fox Features mid tier hero the Eagle is catching a gang of pickpockets, and that gang's lead is named Ben Dread, which I think is unnecessarily cool. Save the good names for more interesting criminals, I say. (Science Comics 003, 1940) 

Drawn Without Reference:

This might just be the bold new look the narwhal have been looking for. (Science Comics 008, 1940)

MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 992: THE VAHINES

(Jungle Comics 013, 1941) The Vahines, aka the Tiger-Women of Wildmoon Mountain, have a plan: kill every other woman in the world, which wil...