Strange Adventures
If you start looking at the covers of comics published in the fifties and all through the sixties, you will notice that gorillas appear on many of the covers. When DC published Strange Adventures #8 in May 1951, little did they know that they were really starting The Gorilla Age of Comics. But with a little research, you will find that something besides superheroes had a hold on comics. Unparalleled space guru Jim Starlin concludes his cosmic DC epic. Brought to you by writer Tony Bedard and artist Claude St. But Starro has a plan up his sleeve that even a super-genius like Dox wont see coming. While I dont doubt the story about the problems with film on the older issues, 1955 is also roughly the year the Silver Age started for DC and so far the Showcase series has stuck exclusively to Silver Age and later material. This is a terrific volume to dip into or browse through for an idea of what our grandparents thought the future could be. Elsewhere, its as simple as the virtue of self-sacrifice for a greater good.
Many times, it's be careful messing around when it comes to scientists pushing the boundaries of what man is meant to know. And all of them have a strong moral lesson, an instructive purpose to telling their tale. Some of the attitudes are inadvertently revealing, as when one group of spacemen aim to create a planet of peace by building better weapons to defeat their enemies. The stories are jam-packed with imagination, with lots happening quickly , and emphasis on the individual hero saving the day with brainpower and gumption. There were plenty of aliens doing wacky things, like making movies with Earth as a set or competing in outer space track-and-field matches. Alien artifacts were things of wonder and anything could be invented or discovered, including such staples of pulp science fiction as killer robots and super-intelligent gorillas.
Men set out to find new power sources or keep aliens from invading or prevent accelerated global warming or explore the universe. Regardless, its wonderful that the black-and-white phonebook-style format allows for reasonably priced reprints of unusual comic material like this, over 500 pages of a glimpse from another era to another era. Reportedly, there are issues with film availability on earlier issues, making it more difficult to reprint the comics affordably. The book begins with issue #54, the first under the Comics Code Authority regulatory group, and continues through #73, with each issue containing four stories. Showcase Presents Strange Adventures reprints science fiction stories from the 1950s Strange Adventures comic. Since then, DC has had little interest in publishing science fiction save for the short-lived DC Science Fiction Graphic Novel series that Schwartz edited from 1985 to 1987. A resurrected Mystery in Space--a reduced-in-size Time Warp for all intents and purposes , was re-launched in 1980 for seven issues before it too was canceled. Yet, DC didnt completely close the door on a resurgence of science fiction in comics.
Debuting in July of 1979 , this intriguing, House of Mystery-in-space anthology Dollar Comic that promised Doomsday Tales and Other Things lasted only five issues--which was long enough to publish a breathtaking-yet-disturbing cover by Kaluta for issue #5.