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 678: AMNOZO

(National Comics 003, 1940) 

Cyclone is an extremely minor Quality Comics future spaceman hero of the year 3000 who, in National Comics 001, participates in a competition between the planets of the solar system to see which one gets to colonize the newly discovered planet Vito. He wins of course, and the remainder of his four appearances are spent dealing with various threats to the new colony, including at least one civilization native to the planet, because colonialism. Do they leave once they realize that the planet is not, in fact, free real estate? Reader, they do not.

But enough interpreting space opera through a historical lens, check out Cyclone's sky skis, possibly the greatest personal flight device in the history of sci fi: little planes that you strap to your feet! And as a bonus, what is possibly the most appetizing food pill I have ever seen.

Cyclone's explorations are interrupted when he and his paramour Joy Sue Mary stumble upon an ancient, Ancient Egyptian style tomb, remnant of yet another civilization endemic to this uninhabited, ready-to-colonize planet. Even more troubling: the tomb's occupant is not a mummy but Amnozo, a living man! He's been waiting for people to show up so that he could... rule them? It's a bit unclear.

What is clear is that Amnozo is pulling the classic Creep's Gambit of attempting to kill off the male protagonist so that he can capture and "romance" (or in this case "marry") the female protagonist - we've seen it all a thousand times before. This is however a very nice rendition of the crushy room style of deathtrap.

Amnozo fold like a house of cards once Cyclone's troops show up to see what happened to him, despite a last-ditch attempt to roast them all with sick blue flame. What an achievement: waiting 4000 years only to end up rotting in whatever repurposed woodshed Cyclone's colonial government is using as a jail just because you couldn't not be a horrible creep to the first woman you saw.

Also: does Amnozo's loincloth not have a back?