Mystery in Space: the Science Fiction Comic Book

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Mystery in Space

1 (April-May 1951) Nine Worlds to Conquer (KG)
2 (June-July 1951) The Comet Peril
4 (October-November 1951) Master of Doom (KG); The Man Who Walked Through Walls
5 (December 1951-January 1952) Kidnapped in Space
6 (February-March 1952) Cowboy on Mars
7 (April-May 1952) Challenge of the Robot Knight (KG); The Case of the Counterfeit Humans; The World Where Dreams Come True
8 (June-July 1952) It's a Woman's World; Lives of a Rocket Lancer (KG)
9 (August-September 1952) The Seven Wonders of Space; The Perfect Planet
10 (October-November 1952) The Dream Adventurer; Interplanetary Enemy Number One
11 (December 1952 -January 1953) The Unknown Spaceman
14 (June-July 1953) Hollywood in Space
15 (August-September 1953) The Doom From Station X
18 (February-March 1954) The Chain-Gang of Space; The Super-Luck of Mr. Luke; The Runaway World (I)
19 (April-May 1954) The Great Space-Train Robbery
20 (June-July 1954) The Boomerang Meteors
24 (February-March 1955) Hitchhiker of Space (SC)
25 (April-May 1955) Station Mars on the Air
26 (June-July 1955) Earth is the Target
27 (August-September 1955) The Human Fishbowl
28 (October-November 1955) The Radio Planet; Journey to the Pygmy Planet
29 (December 1955 - January 1956) Mystery of the Mind-Reading Jewels
30 (February-March 1956) The Impossible World Named Earth; The Boomerang World; The Patent Planet; The Robinson Crusoe of Space (SC)
31 (April-May 1956) The Day the Earth Split in Two; Search for the Space Sparklers (SC)
32 (June-July 1956) There's No Place Like Earth
33 (August-September 1956) The Wooden World War; Fix-It Men From Outer Space; Stranger on Earth
34 (October-November 1956) The Man Who Moved the World
35 (December 1956 -January 1957) The Counterfeit Earth
36 (February-March 1957) Secret of the Moon Sphinx; Earth's Lucky War; The Expanding Space-Taxi (SC)
38 (June-July 1957) The Man Who Doomed a World; The New Year's Eve of 2000 AD
40 (October-November 1957) Riddle of the Runaway Earth
42 (February-March 1958) Secret of the Skyscraper Spaceship; Mail Rider to the Stars; The Dual Identity World
44 (June-July 1958) Amazing Space Flight of North America; Menace of the Falling Moon; Earthman, Go Home
45 (August 1958) Flying Saucers Over Mars
46 (September 1958) Mystery of the Moon Sniper
47 (October 1958) Surprise Package Planet
48 (December 1958) Secret of the Scarecrow World; Amazing Mirages of Space
49 (February 1959) The Sky-High Man
50 (March 1959) Riddle of Asteroid 8794; The Runaway Space-Train
51 (May 1959) The Man Who Discovered the "Earth"
52 (June 1959) Parade of the Planets
53 (August 1959) Prisoner of the Electric Eye
54 (September 1959) Riddle of the Counterfeit Earthmen
55 (November 1959) Behind the Space Curtain
56 (December 1959) Raiders of the Waterless World
58 (March 1960) The Amazing Journeys into Space
59 (May 1960) "Terra" of the Spaceways; Glory Ride to Pluto
60 (June 1960) Mystery of the Synthetic Man
61 (August 1960) The Sleeping War; Escape From the Earth
62 (September 1960) The Magic Lamp From Space
63 (November 1960) Mutiny in High Space
66 (March 1961) Who Caught the Loborilla? (SR)
67 (May 1961) The Language-Master of Space
68 (June 1961) The Sleeping Peril of Mars; Captain Baboon's Space War
71 (November 1961) The Last Space-Feud
72 (December 1961) Doom-Trap for Earth
77 (August 1962) Where Was I Born - Venus? Mars? Jupiter? (SR)
83 (May 1963) Who went where -- and why? (SR)
85 (August 1963) Next Year -- Andromeda
86 (September 1963) When Did Earth Vanish? (SR)
91 (May 1964) The No-Name Planet

These best stories of the comic books are preceded by their issue number. They were edited by Julius Schwartz.

Mystery in Space contained both Adam Strange and general, non-series science fiction stories. Adam Strange stories are not discussed in this article. The early Knights of the Galaxy tales are marked (KG); Space-Cabby are marked (SC); the Star Rovers are marked (SR), Interplanetary Insurance Inc. are marked (I).

Mystery in Space

Mystery in Space is DC's most important science fiction comic book. During 1951 - 1964, its stories followed the same paradigms; this is a very long run for a single editorial approach. All of the stories were pure science fiction. They tended to be very dignified. The heroes tended to be idealistic young men. They usually were members of some skilled profession, one that plays a role in the story. If the story takes place in the present, the hero will be in suit and tie; if in the future, the hero will be in an elaborate sf costume.

Mysteries of New Planets

The Man Who Doomed a World (1957). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Carmine Infantino. The hero of this story is space explorer Hal Burton. Here everything he encounters on a new world turns to stone. He wonders what he is doing to cause this. He explicitly compares himself to Medusa, the character who also turned men to stone in the ancient Greek myth.

Otto Binder wrote a number of science fiction mysteries in which space explorers reach new planets, and encounter strange phenomena, which they have to interpret. The stories are structured as mysteries: the hero tries to figure out the answer, and finally succeeds at the end of the tale. In this story, the hero tries then discards a number of plausible sounding explanations, which just do not work out. This is somewhat similar to the "series" construction one finds in the Superman family, to which Binder also often contributed. It is a bit different however: each element in a series tale often leads to an opposing challenge, something ingenious which prevents the hero from reaching his goal. Here, each new explanation simply fails: there is no opposing, ingenious counter-attack.

The final answer is more ingenious than anything that has gone before it, in the best mystery tradition. It is followed by a brief humanistic conclusion, one that shows the essential decency of Binder and his colleagues in this era.

The Dual Identity World (1958). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Sid Greene. This is another Binder mystery about a hard to interpret planet: here two explorers literally see the world in two different ways. This is a most ingenious tale. It has elements of an allegory and a fable, and should be better known: it would make a great proverb, to illustrate some important ideas about perception.

Earthman, Go Home (1958). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Carmine Infantino. Binder wrote this tale about a space trader who gets a strangely hostile reception on a planet; in a story within a story, a Martian tells him a similar tale about a Mars explorer's first trip to Earth. This double story contains two mysteries for the price of one: it is as if Binder had a number of ideas, and decided to present them each in a fairly concise format, instead of padding them out. The two tales help reinforce one another: both are sf mysteries, both have similar kinds of solutions. By seeing the Martian story, which as the inner tale gets resolved first, the reader gets educated in the paradigm that Binder is trying to set up, and is prepared for it in the second, outer tale. The solution of this outer story is longer and more elaborate.

The space trader here reminds one of the mountain men who traded furs with the Native Americans, and who were some of the first Europeans to live in the American West. His space costume evens resembles an sf version of such a Western trapper's. Westerns were hugely popular in the 1950's.

At one point in the story, the hero takes a pill which temporarily gives him stretching powers, like Plastic Man in the 1940's. That same year, Binder would expose Jimmy Olsen to a serum that gave him similar powers, starting his career as Elastic Lad.

Otto Binder Tales of Miscommunication Between Planets

The Impossible World Named Earth (1956). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Carmine Infantino. A Jovian and an Earth author communicate by telepathy, but no one on either planet will believe them. This gently comic story has many elements in common with Binder's later "Riddle of the Counterfeit Earthmen" (1959). Both stories have a double perspective: aliens discovering humans, and simultaneously, humans discovering aliens. In both stories, the aliens are advanced, scientific and basically peaceful. They have a civilization much like Earth's, with political leaders, scientists and average people, and their attitudes and belief systems are pretty similar to those of modern day Earth people. In addition, in both stories the aliens are hampered by preconceived ideas about other planets, ideas that are backed up and reinforced by the prestige of science. In this tale, the aliens are convinced that other planets do not exist at all, so they view the idea of Earth as being simply "impossible". In "Riddle", the aliens are convinced by scientific analysis that Earth people must look a certain way, based on that planet's gravitation, atmosphere, and so on, so they reject the actual Earthmen who arrive as hoaxsters and impostors. All this leads to a great deal of gentle humor. Part of what is being satirized is the clinging to received ideas in face of evidence. Many astronomical ideas common in the 1950's have already been proved wrong, so Binder's tales have only gathered force since they were first published.

Binder had written previous tales about exchanges between explorers on two planets. "The Human Icicle" (Strange Adventures #53, February 1955) deals with an identity exchange between an Earthman and an inhabitant of Pluto. Each one winds up on the other's planet, the first person ever to visit the other one's world. This mild tale is mainly noteworthy as a precursor to Binder's later works. Binder's stories of two worlds communicating anticipate his later tales of the Exchange Ray used to swap people between Earth and Kandor. Just as some of the "two worlds" tales involve Earthmen and aliens exchanging places, so does the Exchange Ray allow similar swaps.

Authors are common as characters in the DC sf comic books. They tend to be sf authors, and the stories they are writing tend to be very similar to the sf tales that actually appeared in Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures. This allows a recursive effect in the tales: sf stories about authors writing sf stories. It also allows for autobiographical elements: the authors are similar to Binder and his fellow scriptwriters. There is also a broader, sociological angle: we see the background of the sf comic books, and how they are put together. In many of the tales, including this one, the plot turns on one writer coming up with the same sf idea as another; the magazine editors suspect plagiarism, but what is really going on is telepathy. This plot appears again and again in the DC sf magazines. One suspects that it might reflect fears among the writers themselves: they can only sell a story if it contains a new idea that had not appeared in the magazines, and it must have been hard to come up with fresh ideas year after year. Carmine Infantino's art shows the author here, "Wayne Baker", as being very well dressed. He seems to spend most of his time in a suit and tie. Authors were always treated with great reverence in old Hollywood movies as well, depicted as professorial people of high status.

Amazing Mirages of Space (1958). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Murphy Anderson. Just as contemporary Earthmen regard flying saucers as optical illusions, so do the inhabitants of the saucers regard Earth and the solar system as an optical illusion.

This is a fairly static story. It sets up an elaborate astronomical situation, but does little with it to create an actual plot or interaction between the characters. Still, the astronomical set-up is quite rich and imaginative. It ties in with the "cosmic" premises often found in Binder, in which whole astronomical environments are the subject of the story. And in the Binder tradition, there is some astronomical engineering at the end of this cosmic tale, used to save Earth. Murphy Anderson has some vivid astronomical art illustrating outer space scenes.

The story also falls into the Binder First Contact tradition. As is often the case in such Binder tales, there is a symmetry of miscomprehension between the two groups, both aliens and Earthmen, neither of whom can understand the other. As is often the case in Binder, received, conventional ideas turn out to be dead wrong.

Binder wrote some stories dealing with flying saucer hoaxes: "The Flying Saucer Boomerang" (Strange Adventures #52, January 1955) and "The Flying Saucers that Saved the World" (Strange Adventures #76, January 1957). The astronomy professor here also shows how the illusion of flying saucers can occur.

As in most of Binder's tales about flying saucers, there is a bit of special pleading, suggesting that the saucers might be real. This tale tries to explain a central objection of the idea that flying saucers are visitors from another world: "If saucers are alien spaceships, why have they never landed and made contact with humans?" Binder's tale tries to rationalize this quandary, just as other Binder stories such as "The Supergirl From Krypton" (Action Comics #252, May 1959) rationalized questions in the Superman mythos.

Riddle of the Counterfeit Earthmen (1959). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Gil Kane. Earth astronauts land on another planet; its alien scientists refuse to believe they are Earthmen, because they do not conform to the ideas the scientists have about what Earth people must be like. This tale is just delightful. Like all the Mystery in Space stories, it is short, just eight pages, but it manages to pack a huge amount of plot into them. Although in many ways it is a serious story, both Binder's script and Gil Kane's art have a vein of humor which keeps peeping out.

The hero of this story is also named Hal Burton, just like that of an earlier Binder tale, "The Man Who Doomed a World" (1957). He does not seem to be the same character, however: the two men do not look the same, and the Burton of the earlier tale was exploring the far flung reaches of the galaxy, whereas the later story is set in a less advanced future world where humans are still exploring the solar system, here Saturn's moon Titan. The name reminds one of Green Lantern's secret identity, Hal Jordan, who was appearing for the first time that same month in Showcase. Green Lantern's artist Gil Kane also drew this tale. Burton travels along with co-pilot Gil Hardy; in Mystery in Space, spacemen often journey in pairs.

The purported Earthmen of the title look a lot like the creatures that kept popping up in Kane's early Green Lantern tales. These comic "monsters" are huge, have very long arms in proportion to their bodies, and tend to have whiskers or jowls that hand down symmetrically on both sides of their face. All of them have a comic look, more bewildered than sinister, that suggests they are a good natured parody of the creatures that appeared in 1950's monster movies. Kane's art also has other features in common with Green Lantern. The rescue of the city at the end is also like the feats GL is often performing, with a huge man made science fictional object in the air hovering over a traditional city or other non sf structure below. In the GL stories, the aerial sf object is green and made up of beams from GL's ring; in this story, the aerial object is a giant lead shield.

This shield against radiation also recalls the Argo City shields in a story Binder wrote earlier that year, "The Supergirl From Krypton", Supergirl's origin tale in Action Comics. Other typical Binder features: we see samples of the script used on Titan (presumably drawn by Gil Kane), just as we saw Kryptonese writing in such Superman family tales of the same year such as "Superman's Other Life" (1959) and "The Boy who Killed Superman" (1959) in Jimmy Olsen. And the renegades on Titan plotting dictatorship recall the renegades that often show up on Krypton in the Superman family.

Flying Saucers Over Mars (1958). Writer: Joe Millard. Art: Carmine Infantino. Based on a cover by: Gil Kane. Martians begin to see flying saucers in the sky, which they suspect are from Earth. Amusing role reversal story, with many ingenious twists. The story takes place entirely on Mars. The Martians are friendly, normal beings, and not at all the monsters they were sometimes depicted in prose sf and movies. There is perhaps a bit of a political allegory here: people in other countries and other races are a lot like us. This depiction is consistent with the standard approach in the Schwartz sf magazines of depicting alien beings as "normal".

This story is a precursor to Otto Binder's "Riddle of the Counterfeit Earthmen" (1959). Many of the plot elements in Joe Millard's story recur in Binder's. Binder has added most of the scientific elements to "Earthmen", and the ideas about preconceptions of scientists - these do not occur in Millard's tale. The combination of such Binder ideas and Millard's plot elements makes for a very complex story. Millard's story in turn follows a tradition of Schwartz magazine sf stories about flying saucer hoaxes: see two tales written by Otto Binder, "The Flying Saucer Boomerang" (Strange Adventures #52, January 1955) and "The Flying Saucers that Saved the World" (Strange Adventures #76, January 1957).

Millard does a good job at depicting the two Earth spacemen in the tale as thinking beings. One of the spacemen, the more hot headed one, shows logic and skepticism in analyzing what the crooks in the story tell him, and independently arriving at his own conclusions. This character is a role model for the readers of Mystery in Space. People should not blindly accept what is told them, the story is suggesting. Instead they should try to listen with an open mind. Then they should independently compare what they have heard with what they know and what they can learn through investigation, and try to come with an accurate idea of the true facts. Such an approach is useful for scientists, and also for other areas of life. The spaceman here gives sound, logical reasons for his beliefs; Millard shows good story construction with this reasoning about the plot.

Millard treats the two Earth spacemen egalitarianly. Both make a contribution to the plot. The other spaceman, the calmer one, does not contribute to his friend's initial skepticism. But it is he who figures out how to solve the problems that ultimately confront the spacemen. Each spaceman has his own cognitive personality, and his own type of ideas he can contribute to the discussion.

Infantino contributes many Martian desert and rock landscapes here; one (p 5) with a bridge and two large rocks is especially original.

Otto Binder Cosmic Stories

The Boomerang Meteors (1954). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Mort Drucker. Meteors that have already landed on Earth mysteriously start returning upward to outer space.

This tale includes a fascinating attack on racism. The tale allegorically refers to the Nazis and their notorious racial ideas, which the story describes as "vicious propaganda". Binder would go on to write the anti-Nazi classic "Superman's Return to Krypton" (Superman #123, August 1958). This is plainly a subject on which he had deep beliefs.

The Boomerang World (1956). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Frank Giacoia. Space pilot Orton Boone looks for a new source of Dynium, the only known substance that can power space travel. Binder sets his tale at a time when Dynium has almost run out, and the story is of a time when space travel has become nearly impossible.

This story has definite Cosmic elements. But it differs from many Cosmic stories in that these ideas are only one part of an intricate plot.

The Counterfeit Earth (1957). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Joe Kubert. Based on a cover by: Gil Kane. To fool war-mongering aliens, Earth creates a duplicate of itself next door in space; two returning Earth spacemen also have to figure out which planet is real. The Earth and space are Binder's subjects here, just as in "Secret of the Moon Sphinx" (1957). Binder weaves a story about them. This story is one of a series of Binder tales that I have labeled his Cosmic stories. These are tales that deal with phenomena on an astronomical scale. The events of the story are actions that happen to the solar system itself, the Earth, the Moon, the Sun and other planets. The scale of such stories is vast, and can span millennia. Binder mainly wrote such tales for Mystery in Space. They rarely appeared in other comics, even Strange Adventures. They form a precious legacy.

The aliens in the story plan to dismember the Earth; in this they anticipate Brainiac, Binder's villain who stole cities.

Binder includes one of his trademark hoaxes here. Such hoaxes were common in the Superman family, and such writers as Otto Binder, Jerry Siegel and Robert Bernstein. They are quite infrequent in the comic books edited by Julius Schwartz, however. Parts of the tale also deal in passing with another Binder interest, means of communication.

The two spacemen in this story are very similar in characterization to Tommy Tomorrow and Brent Wood. One suspects that Binder was so used to writing the Tomorrow tales that he just thought naturally in those terms.

Joe Kubert is making a relatively rare appearance in Mystery in Space here. His depiction of the two Earth spacemen, Jon Quade and Will Starr, is remarkably macho. The story stresses an idealized friendship between the two men. Both of the men are extremely grown-up; one even has a receding hairline.

Secret of the Moon Sphinx (1957). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Carmine Infantino. Based on a cover by: Gil Kane. An alien creature lives inside a statue of the Sphinx found by astronauts on the dark side of the Moon; he tells his story about his life on Earth in ancient Atlantis. This is one of Binder's tales of Cosmic Consciousness. The Earth, the Moon, and geological and astronomical events on both play a role in this tale. So does what you can see from various positions in space, always a favorite Binder subject in such tales.

The story also has elements of another Binder specialty: First Contact and how differences in perceptions between humans and aliens play a role. There is some good humor in this story, especially in Binder's explanation of why alien UFO's are coming to Earth. Binder always had humane values, and the UFO episode here stands in charming contrast to all the horror fantasies that fill X-Files style television shows today.

Riddle of the Runaway Earth (1957). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Sid Greene. An archeologist in Easter Island discovers an alien device related to Earth's moving out of its orbit. Fascinating story that is one of Binder's best tales of very large "spaceships" wandering through space. Such tales include "Amazing Space Flight of North America", and will climax in Binder's invention of the bottled city of Kandor. The story uses another Binder specialty: the use of unusual devices and media to communicate between humans and aliens. Here, Binder shows what can be done with a planetarium.

The Sky-High Man (1959). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Mike Sekowsky. A trip to another universe causes an astronaut to turn into a giant. For the Superman family of comic books, Binder wrote many stories of transformations. These are tales in which the hero is temporarily changed in some way. Some science fiction event will cause the hero to undergo a transformation. He will have a series of adventures predicated on his new shape and abilities. Finally, some antidote will be discovered, and it will cause him to revert to his normal self at the end of the tale. This story falls into this paradigm exactly. What is different about this tale is the scale of the transformation. When Superboy or Jimmy Olsen are transformed, they usually stay their normal size, or a least remain on a human scale. Here, however, the hero becomes a giant on a cosmic scale, much bigger than the Earth itself. And his adventures are similarly cosmic in tone.

Binder's cosmic stories are oddly similar in tone to his transformation tales. The transformation stories tend to take place against a background of everyday Earth life. The hero repeatedly uses his new abilities to interface with some interesting aspect of modern Earth culture and life. The cosmic stories tend to have the same nonchalant, friendly, low key tone. As his heroes make their way across the solar system and the universe, each new astronomic marvel they encounter is made part of some pleasant, ingenious adventure. The cosmic tales are about beings for whom the universe is simply the stuff of everyday life.

Binder's heroes tend to be contented with their lives before their transformation. Life was good, then zap! They are now 60 feet tall, or invisible. Few of them are obsessed, or in the grip of terrible anxieties or burning emotional needs. Instead they tend to be well balanced and emotionally secure. They are usually cheerful and optimistic during their transformation, resiliently adapting to each new situation. They do not tend to worry too much about their problems; instead they keep trying to find practical ways to adjust. Nor do their stories tend to lead them into conflicts of good versus evil. Just coping with their transformation is a big enough concern.

Otto Binder Cosmic Mysteries

Amazing Space Flight of North America (1958). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Sid Greene. This story spans millennia, and generates cosmic perspectives. It reminds one of the Kandor stories Otto Binder was writing the same year for Action Comics.

Parade of the Planets (1959). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Frank Giacoia. An alien promoter enters Earth in the Parade of the Planets, a display of planets with unusual features. This is an sf mystery; the hero and reader are challenged to guess what unique characteristic Earth has that makes it suitable for a prize in the Parade. The tale is very much in the tradition of Binder's "Amazing Space Flight of North America" the previous year. Both are sf mysteries. Both involve individual aliens with secrets who come to Earth. Both involve unusual space flights of large bodies. Both involve looking at properties of the Earth, over the cosmic perspective of millennia and great distances. Both involve much examination of maps and geography of North America. Both involve much reasoning on the part of the hero, exploring various hypothetical solutions to the mystery, before discarding them after a consideration of the evidence.

The Parade itself oddly resembles Binder's Legion of Super-Heroes. The Legion is a collection of super-beings; the Parade is an assemblage of planets. Each member of the Legion has some unusual power that makes him unique; each planet in the Parade has some special property that makes it unique. In many ways the Parade is the same concept as the Legion, but raised to a cosmic level, with whole plants as members. This is typical of the cosmic perspective of this story: everything is looked at in terms of worlds, and vast spans of astronomical time. Binder's sf mystery "Amazing Space Flight of North America" also has the cosmic point of view, as does his non-mysterious but equally cosmic "The Sky-High Man" (1959).

Binder also wrote other stories about unusual worlds. The cubical moon in this story anticipates the equally cubical Bizarro World that first appeared in Binder's "The Superman Bizarro" (Action Comics #264, May 1960). Binder also wrote about a cubical Earth and Moon in "The Square Earth" (#22, October-November 1954), a story based on a cover by Murphy Anderson. Binder included strange planets in "World at the Edge of the Universe" (Strange Adventures #60, September 1955). Both "The Square Earth" and "World at the Edge of the Universe" are minor as stories, but they point in directions of Binder's later fiction. "The Square Earth" contains the hoaxes that will play a common role in Binder's and other writers' Superman family work. And "World at the Edge of the Universe" deals with a young man from Earth trying to find acceptance into an elite group of youths from many planets, like Binder's later "The Legion of Super-Heroes" (Adventure #247, April 1958).

Other Otto Binder SF Tales

The Great Space-Train Robbery (1954). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Gil Kane. Based on a cover by Murphy Anderson. When his space ship is robbed and damaged, its Captain chooses to stay with it and protect its cargo against the obstacles of space. The first Otto Binder tale in Mystery in Space. The story is a delightful space opera. Like most of Binder's futuristic tales, it takes place in a civilian oriented, non-militaristic future. There is little emphasis on violence; there is instead much science fictional imagination and storytelling vigor.

Binder's story is based on a cover by Murphy Anderson, which shows the robbery of the "space-train". The first sentences of Binder's splash panel explicitly state what the story will be and not be about. Binder announces that he will not focus on the robbers or the robbery; instead he will concentrate on the heroic Captain. This is typical of Binder's interest in good guys. The explicit declaration of the story's subject and intent also seems Binder-like. It anticipates the complex reflective features Binder often included in his Superman family tales, such as Imaginary and Untold tales.

Elements of the plot here anticipate Binder's Tommy Tomorrow tale "The Strangest Crew in the Universe" (Action #241, June 1958). Both stories are adventure tales that involve legal issues as a basis for their plots: here the Captain cannot abandon his cargo without losing his legal rights to it to salvagers. Both tales involve testimony from unusual witnesses. Both stories have endlessly resourceful protagonists who are always trying new things. Such heroes are part of the Binder tradition, and his later tales often show Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane showing a similar resourcefulness during challenging situations. This story also reflects Binder's interest in media of communication, here live television.

Gil Kane shows his enthusiasm and skill here, with art that conveys joie de vivre. The starscapes here are beautiful. There is also an aerial view of one of Kane's Constructivist cities of the future ( p3).

Rip Van Winkle of Space (#27, August-September 1955). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Gil Kane. The body of an astronaut frozen for a hundred years is revived in the advanced space civilization of the future. This is a modest but pleasant story whose plot is a little too obvious. The tale's guided tour of the advanced future society on Mars anticipates a similar tour Binder included in his classic "The Mystery of Mighty Boy" (Superboy #85, December 1960). Both stories show education being aided by videotapes and talking books.

Sid Greene's overhead view of Marsopolis shows one of his cityscapes. Many of the buildings are purely rectilinear, somewhat atypically for him. These are intermixed with other structures that are purely circular. The overhead pattern of rectangles and circles makes a pleasing design.

Menace of the Falling Moon (1958). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: John Giunta. Here a book dealer searches for a ten year old science fiction novel, all copies of which seem to have vanished. This story reminds one of Borges' strange story about an unusual book about another planet, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" (1940). Both tales have a strange, off center quality. The art is by John Giunta, who later worked on The Fly; it looks different from that of the other artists in the magazine.

A character in the story is a noted collector of science fiction, Art Forrest. He is clearly a friendly homage to the real life collector of sf, Forrest J. Ackerman. We see the collector's book lined home; it looks just like the collection rooms of Ackerman's real life home, the Ackermansion (I've seen it in a TV documentary).

Riddle of Asteroid 8794 (1959). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Frank Giacoia. An explorer searches for his missing friend, a disc jockey who has been kidnapped by bad guys who are looking for some space jewels. Elements of the story recall Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold-Bug" (1843).

What is most appealing about this story is its look at an advanced future civilization. The world is at peace, and people seem devoted to leading normal lives. The tale opens in a theme park of the future. It recalls some of the festive locales of "The Legion of Super-Heroes" (1958), also written by Binder, and which also takes place in a peaceful future civilization. Also appealing is the way the two men are genuine friends.

Giacoia's art shows some interesting future buildings, such as the house like structure which contains the radio station. Also neat are the space suits. They have a guardsman like look, with cross straps, shoulder flanges and high collars.

The Man Who Discovered the "Earth" (1959). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Manny Stallman. A space explorer discovers a planet which is almost exactly similar to the Earth, but whose history differs in many small ways. Binder wrote a story using a similar approach a year later, "The "Superman" from Outer Space" (Action Comics #265, June 1960). Both stories are based on the premise that since there are millions of inhabited worlds in the universe, that there must be some that are nearly exact duplicates of Earth, down to such details as clothes, history, technology, etc. This premise is fairly common in science fiction. Usually a slight variant of it is used: the world of if. In such tales, there are billions of variants of Earth that all exist simultaneously in parallel universes. Each Earth differs from ours by some small variation in its history or technology. Binder's approach here is similar, but substitutes the limitless size of our universe to create a world parallel to Earth.

Binder's "Earth" differs from ours in not just one way, but in many ways. His hero spends most of the story discovering all the differences between the two planets. This makes Binder's story richer and more complex than many stories with this theme. Binder's hero keeps trying to find ways to improve life on the other "Earth", but he keeps being frustrated by technological differences between the two planets. The story construction here uses the typical challenge and rebuff construction that Binder often employed:

The Challenge: The hero tries to improve life on the planet by introducing some piece of Earth technology unknown on the new world.
The Rebuff: But he soon discovers that something on the environment of the planet prevents this, for example, a missing natural resource.

Binder repeats this cycle several times, as is typical in his challenge and rebuff tales. The hero is defeated again and again, but he is not discouraged. He keeps on trying. At the end of the tale he finally succeeds: one kind of typical Binder finale. In other Binder stories, the hero never succeeds. Note that the structure of these stories pits a human against an environment. The challenge stories typically use this approach. They are usually NOT tales about people versus people, although Binder sometimes does this too. Rather, they tend to be about a human trying to accomplish some goal, and an environment or circumstances that keep conspiring to defeat it. Note I've said "human" here. Binder is not a sexist, and many of the challenge stories have female protagonists such as Lois Lane, Lana Lang and Supergirl.

This story also anticipates Binder's "The World of Bizarros" (Action Comics #263, April 1960). As in the Bizarro World, everything is spelled differently than on Earth: the planet itself is spelled Erth. The story also emphasizes the many ways in which history or customs on Erth are the exact opposite from those on our Earth. This too anticipates the Bizarro World. The motivation here is different: unlike the Bizarro world, this planet is not supposed to be goofy or mixed up - it is simply different from Earth, an alternate approach. Still, the technique of the two stories is similar.

The Earth explorer in this story is part of a long standing family tradition. His father found new planets, and at the end of the tale he looks forward to his son discovering new worlds. The Bizarros will also evoke family life: Bizarro and his wife Bizarro Lois will have a family, as will the other Bizarro couples. So will the Hyperman of "The "Superman" from Outer Space". This theme of "alternate Earths" seems closely linked in Binder's mind with families and children. One might note that none of these planets are imaginary, or in a different dimension. There are all real planets in our own universe.

The Amazing Journeys into Space (1960). Writer: Otto Binder. Art: Murphy Anderson. A young man hopes a time machine will allow him to realize his dream of becoming a space pioneer. Idealistic story, about the pursuit of dreams. As in Binder's "The Boy Who Saved the Solar System" (Strange Adventures #95, August 1958), it stars a young man who is a scientific pioneer.

The time travel elements here fuel a complex temporal structure in the storytelling. First we see a key moment of the hero's life on the splash, then a flash back to his life story from the beginning, then travel back in time that revisits and tries to change events in the hero's life and times. This all recalls the even more complex and innovative structure of "Superman's Other Life" (Superman #132, October 1959), Binder's Imaginary Story masterpiece.

This story resembles Binder's "The Legion of Super-Heroes" (Adventure #247, April 1958). In both, a young man tries to join an elite group - here of space pioneers. In both, he must perform feats to do so. But more pressing concerns keep distracting him from doing these feats - something that has a Binder "challenge and rebuff" structure in both works. Both stories have a bittersweet quality, which is stronger here. Both also point towards similar moral lessons. There are other parallels to the Superman stories Binder sometimes wrote. The use of lead in the story recalls works such as "The Kryptonite Man" (Action #249, February 1959), in which Superman makes a lead suit against Kryptonite. And the emphasis on time travel and trying to change "fate" in common in the Superman stories of many authors; rare in the Julius Schwartz-edited sf and super-hero comics.

The splash shows busts commemorating the space pioneers we will meet later in the story; Binder's Tommy Tomorrow tale "The Space Hall of Fame" (Action #209, October 1955), features a planetoid is filled with statues of the heroes. Also Binder-like: throughout the tale, we see the heroes announcing their discoveries, often through the mass media of the future. This is typical of Binder's interest in means of communication.

The tale also recalls Binder's "The Sky-High Man" (Mystery in Space #49, February 1959). Both focus on a solitary space traveler, who embarks on a universe-wide flight full of astronomical marvels. Binder's heroes tend to be self-reliant, and resilient in the face of calamity. The sadness experienced by the hero here is fairly rare among Binder heroes, who usually respond to setbacks with a smile and an attempt to make things better. The sad, permanent difficulties he faces here recall "The Mystery of Mighty Boy" (Superboy #85, December 1960) a bit.

The feats the young man performs here are smaller in scale than the re-workings of planets and solar systems in Binder's cosmic engineering stories. But the feats still do involve the forces of space and time, and still take place in an astronomical environment. So they have many similarities, on a slightly smaller scale, to the cosmic stories.

Edmond Hamilton tales

The Comet Peril (1951). Writer: Edmond Hamilton. Art: Murphy Anderson. In 1986, a professor of astronomy at Gotham Observatory in New York City is alarmed about what a comet might mean to Earth's orbit. We tend to associate the Cosmic story with Otto Binder, because he wrote so many in the later 1950's. However, the first Cosmic story in Mystery in Space is this one in issue #2, and it was written by Edmond Hamilton. Binder often shows a pattern in his work of being influenced by Hamilton (and vice versa). Hamilton's story is very well constructed and paced. He includes a young assistant astronomy professor, Guy Dover, who is an excellent rocket ship pilot, adding a figure of combined intellect and adventure to the tale. Hamilton and the sf comic books in general revered intellect, and both Guy Dover and the professor are figures of deep admiration in this story. The professor is like many of Hamilton's heroes in that he is out of sync with popular thought throughout the story; he always seems to be ahead of the conventional ideas around him, using his astronomical expertise to focus on the genuine issue. The professor eventually addresses the UN, the first of many such scenes in Mystery in Space. Hamilton also shows idealism by describing the future of 1986 as one of peace and prosperity.

Murphy Anderson's art is dignified, even majestic. He vividly recreates the scenes of the story, which flash all round the Earth, then move into outer space. His depiction of the tow-beam is good. He also excels at his uniformed heroes, such as the sea Captain (p5) and Guy Dover in his pilot's jacket.

The End of the World (#4, October-November 1951). Writer: Edmond Hamilton. Art: Murphy Anderson. A man warns that using atomic power might destroy the planet. This is a minor tale. It might have some interest to sociological critics who are interested in attitudes to atomic energy. The protagonist is one of Hamilton's outsiders who expresses ideas that are not popular with society's mainstream.

This tale is best for Anderson's futuristic suits. These are very serious and macho looking, especially the trenchcoat like great-coats the men wear over them.

The Man Who Walked Through Walls (1951). Writer: Edmond Hamilton. Art: Gil Kane. Dr. John Arden of Coast Technical University in Los Angeles develops an apparatus that allows people to walk through walls. The transparency of the walls here anticipates Hamilton's later "The Incredible Eyes of Arthur Geil" (Strange Adventures #77, February 1957). In that story, the hero can see through all walls and physical objects; here the characters can walk through walls and other obstacles. The story thoroughly explores various objects through which the people might walk. It draws a complete blueprint of what this might be like as a power. This story could easily have served as a pilot for a potential super-hero series. I do not know if its creators had any such idea in mind; 1951 was not a propitious time commercially to launch any new super-heroes, a genre that had fallen out of favor.

This tale is rich in Los Angeles local color. This is quite rare in the DC sf comics, which tend to be New York City oriented, when they are not featuring remote, exotic locations. Coast Tech, as it is referred to in the tale, is a thinly disguised version of a major real life technical university.

Dr. John Arden is depicted as one of Kane's heroic leading men. The sf magazines always presented a glamorous image for scientific heroes. He has one of Kane's snazzy costumes, one with a chest logo of a triangle within a circle. Such pure geometric figures are appropriate for Kane, whose art often follows the Constructivist approach of being built up out of geometric patterns. The costume has a control switch, which sticks out in a straight line from the front of the hero's belt. This is a very unusual effect, which I do not recall seeing in any other comic book costume. It is referred to in the script of the story, and is probably the result of a collaboration between Hamilton's script and Kane's art. At the end of the tale we see Dr. John Arden in a good suit, which is perhaps a more typical real-life garb for a professor than a super-hero costume!

The Patent Planet (1956). Writer: Edmond Hamilton. Art: Sid Greene. Solar System Agent John Carrick goes undercover to probe crimes at the Patent Planet, an entire artificial satellite created to hold patent models in the year 2256. This tale is a nice blend of science fiction and the mystery. Tales of government agents going undercover had been very popular in semi-documentary crime films, especially from 1945 to 1951. Hamilton's tale is a little later. It does have the high tech background popular in such movies, although in Hamilton, it is the whole world that is high tech, not just the hero.

The story takes place in one of Hamilton's pleasing "peace and prosperity" futures. The way the solar system is run by the United Planets Government echoes the idealistic hopes many DC sf writers had for the United Nations during the Silver Age. Hamilton's finale also shows his idealistic spirit.

Sid Greene opens the tale with one of his beautiful overhead panoramas. The landscape is cheery and joyous looking. It represents a future architecture of humanity. Greene has made the world a little less curvilinear and less surreal than some of his landscapes. It is supposed to represent the "normal", advanced world of the future.

The New Year's Eve of 2000 AD (1957). Writer: Edmond Hamilton. Art: Sid Greene. In this story, a scientist tries to prevent a disaster from happening when a bell is run on the New Year's Eve of December 31, 1999. With all the interest in the millennium today, it would be nice if this tale were reprinted, so that today's readers could see how the event was imagined in 1957.

Sid Greene's art shows his usual interest in futuristic architecture. There is a drawing of a clover leaf highway interchange that is especially beautiful. They show a excellent pattern of curved lines. I also like the depiction of some moving sidewalks.

John Broome's Early Power Stories

The Doom From Station X (1953). Writer: John Broome. Art: Murphy Anderson. A young man grows up under a sinister dictatorship, but an abandoned space station gives him new powers to rebel against it. This story gives a complete, sinister picture of a totalitarian state. It appeared at a time when Stalin was still alive and in power, and when Hitler had been dead only eight years. So such themes were very much on people's minds. Broome shows the whole civilian population quivering in fear under a dictator. He does not explore or consider the ideas advanced by several modern historians: that large groups of civilians in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany collaborated with their governments on their programs of evil.

Powers in Broome tend to be associated with outer space. In Green Lantern, the hero gets his from the Guardians of the Universe; here the hero obtains them from a space station. The power tends to be cosmic: Green Lantern's rays, the power rays from the space station, the new force found in "The Man Who Moved the World". These powers at first glance look like traditional comic book super powers, but there are differences. Superman's powers are located within his body. They are part of his biological identity as an individual. So are most of the super powers in the Superman family, such as those of the Legion of Super-Heroes; the same is true of Marvel super-heroes. In contrast, the powers of Broome's heroes are external: they involve a technology used by the hero, such as Green Lantern's ring or the space station here. Because of this, the powers can be shared with other people, such as the Green Lanterns of multiple worlds.

Murphy Anderson favored simple, lightly colored costumes that revealed the hero's musculature. He liked space suits, and other form fitting costumes. Here his hero is in a simple pullover shirt and pants. Such simplicity, and emphasis on depicting the body, recalls Anderson's classical approach.

The Day the Earth Split in Two (1956). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. Based on a cover by: Gil Kane. A couple who were born and lived all their lives on another planet return to Earth for the first time, but discover it split in two. A space metal discovered by the husband Jym Furnes provides the anti-gravity power needed to reunite the planet. Once again, a power from outer space helps save the day. Broome's dialogue points out that it is literally saving the world here - a reference to one of the most popular traditional themes of prose pulp fiction.

One could contrast this story with Binder's "The Counterfeit Earth" (1957), which appeared just four issues later. Both stories are based on covers by Gil Kane. Both covers are very similar: this tale's shows Earth split in two, "Counterfeit" shows two Earths. But the stories the two writers have constructed are radically different in approach, and reflect the two writers' literary personalities. Binder's is one of his Cosmic tales: it deals with a series of events that take place on an astronomical scale. Binder's is also an adventure story, stressing upbeat excitement and escapism. Broome's story, by contrast, is mainly political: the tale is an allegory of Cold War hostility between Russia and the West. The splitting of the world here stands for the isolation the Communist dictators imposed on the people of the countries they controlled. The way the split threatens to send one half of the world falling into the Sun evokes the terrifying nuclear standoff of the era. Broome evokes such complex ideas with extraordinary grace and naturalness. As in many of Broome's stories, we get a detailed, step by step history of the events leading up to the world split, and then its eventual cure.

Sid Greene's art is not as flamboyant here as in some tales. But he does create a consistent architecture for this future world. It emphasizes trapezoidal buildings, with titled windows.

The Man Who Moved the World (1956). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. Based on a cover by: Gil Kane. A young man who is rejected for most jobs discovers a power that could save the Earth from the soon to explode Sun. Broome's early sf stories often deal with young men who are marginalised in society. They come from humble backgrounds, and grow up without influence or prospects. Then they somehow obtain enormous power - science fictional power, not conventional political power. They use this power purely for good, to help other people. Often times, they do astonishingly large things that benefit everyone. Then they become heroes of their society. They are often transformed by these events, even physically, and often wind up as different beings by the end of the tales. Such a story line clearly is a day dream or wish fulfillment fantasy. It speaks to the deep needs of a lot of people. It is interesting that Broome's characters seem completely lacking in malice. They do not use their power to pay anybody back, or to hurt others. Even Broome's villains, such as Sinestro in the Green Lantern stories, seem more interested in acquiring wealth and prestige with their ill-gotten powers, than in harming anybody.

Despite the sheer directness of this brief story as day dream fantasy, the tale is not lacking in humor. Some of the hero's job experiences seem like especially funny sf take-offs on clichés of 1950's work.

The power in this story is never fully explained, or given a deep scientific rationalization. After all, it is just a six page tale. The story is based on a cover by Gil Kane, which shows the power in question being used to move the Earth. Broome's tale was probably an attempt to "explain" Kane's cover, an attempt to include it into a meaningful story. This was a common procedure in Silver Age comics, writing a story that rationalizes an imaginative cover. The cover anticipates Kane's later Green Lantern stories, and the use of fantastic powers to perform huge, large scale deeds. As in the Green Lantern tales, the power assumes pure geometric shapes on the cover here.

John Broome and Politics, Sid Greene and Future Architecture

Station Mars on the Air (1955). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sy Barry. Kind-hearted Martians discover a future Earth in which life has vanished. Complexly plotted story that weaves back and forth in time. Many of Broome's stories deal with massive change coming about, through small, step by step increments: see "The Wooden World War" (1956) for a classic example. This story poses the question: what if someone interfered at the earliest small steps, thus altering the whole process? This is an interesting moment for Broome's focus; most of his stories show the total process of change.

Sy Barry shows a Martian city, in the futuristic Art Deco mode frequently seen in the comics (p3). It is full of ramps and balconies, like a typical such city. However, Barry shows us a closer view than do many comic book artists. Details are bigger and more vivid, and their geometry plays a more forceful role in the composition. There is also an excellent view of a Martian rocket launch viewed from a balcony (p2). The speech balloons here have interesting zigzag lines. Later, he also includes an elegantly dressed Earth scientist in suit and tie.

Earth is the Target (1955). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. A party of scientists on Mars, working with an undercover Earthman, cooperates with a group of Earth scientists trying to thwart a Martian warlord's attempts to blow up Earth, by constructing a duplicate planet of Earth to serve as a decoy target. The duplicate Earth gets one of Broome's full "biographies". He shows how it started out as a scientific experiment having nothing to do with Mars, and gradually got involved as a defense against the dictator. Broome interweaves this Earth story with a whole tale of a Martian underground working against a dictator, one of his favorite themes. Broome went on to write stories about aliens disguised as humans on Earth, such as "The Martian Masquerader" (Strange Adventures #67, April 1956) and "The Skyscraper that Came to Life" (Strange Adventures #72, September 1956). Here he role reverses that situation, having a human disguise himself as a Martian on Mars.

The brief sports element here reminds one of Broome's future contributions to Strange Sports Stories. It also shows how people can convince themselves of ideas based purely on social custom. This is a theme that will recur in depth in Broome's later "The Wooden World War" (1956) and other tales.

The story is somewhat typical of Broome in that it has two protagonists. One is the scientist who invented the duplicate Earth, Robert Wylie. The other is the adventure hero of the story, the man who goes underground on Mars as a Martian, Captain Ordway. Wylie gets more of the emotional development in the tale. He is also a bit more of a character with whom the reader identifies, whereas the scientist is seen a little bit more from the outside. This two hero construction shows up in other Broome tales, such as "The Sculptor Who Saved the World" (Strange Adventures #56, May 1955). Broome always deeply admires the scientists. But he identifies emotionally more with the non-scientists in the tale, the person undergoing the adventures. The story also contains a sympathetic Martian scientist; he reminds one of the alien, morally noble refugee from Qward in Broome's "The Secret of the Golden Thunderbolts" (Green Lantern #2, September-October 1960). The great variety of plot situations, heroes, planets and groups of characters make this a rich and complex story.

The duplicate Earth in this story resembles that in Binder's "The Counterfeit Earth" (1957). Both also anticipate the Krypton Memorial planet in the Superman mythos. All of these are man-made, full scale duplicates of real planets.

Greene has one of his spectacular cityscapes here (p8), depicting the advanced buildings on Mars.

Mystery of the Mind-Reading Jewels (1955). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. Jewels, known as telegems, are discovered that give their wearer mind-reading abilities. Well done sf mystery hybrid. In Broome's mystery story "The Case of the 14 Clueless Crimes" (Strange Adventures #162, March 1964), the most important clue was that there were no clues. This tale has a somewhat similar feel. Everything looks completely normal, and this itself is puzzling and mysterious, in the sf context of the story.

In his personal tradition, Broome includes a whole history of the discovery and use of the telegems. This leads to one of his two hero stories, with the scientist who discovers the gems in the story's first part, and the detective hero in the second.

Alfred Bester had written a prose sf-mystery, The Demolished Man (1953), about a world filled with telepathy.

The telegems here turn into a source of social power. This is a common theme in Broome's work. They become controlled, each individually, by a handful of wealthy capitalists. These capitalists remind one of the 19th Century diamond millionaires that came out of Southern Africa or the gold mining millionaires of the American West; the whole tale evokes such a late 19th Century milieu. Broome does not comment pro or con about this arrangement, and his hero is not given the ability or opportunity to change it. It can be argued that such an outcome is merely a realistic expectation about what might happen if a handful of telegems were introduced into a capitalistic society. Also, Broome has only so much room to plot in a short comics story, and this tale is already overflowing with plot inventiveness already.

However, it seems different from the sf comics' usual concern that inventions be used for the common good. Nor were robber barons of any sort common in the sf comics; their presence here seem surprising. The wealthy men seem to be using the gems to make money, and to prop up their business enterprises, rather than exerting control over the lives of their fellow men. Broome's hero does spend much effort preventing the gems from falling into the hands of a war-mongering dictator, a deep concern of all the DC sf writers.

Broome's locating of telepathic powers in objects, such as the telegems, rather than in a human telepath's mutant biology, also seems innovative. It reminds one of his Green Lanterns to come, whose powers come from the rings they wear. Prose sf writers were often obsessed with promoting the idea that telepaths were real, and that human beings right now in real life had psychic powers. John Campbell practically turned his prose sf magazines into commercials for such ideas. Scientific experimentation has not been kind to this idea: there is little scientific evidence for the existence of psychic powers in people. By contrast, Broome has no ax to grind here. He is purely trying to let his science fictional imagination soar.

The Wooden World War (1956). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. Based on a cover by: Sid Greene. A future Earth bans the use of wood, but its antique World War I wooden airplanes turn out to be the only devices that can counteract an alien invasion. Inventive tale that has been a reader favorite over the years.

Broome shows the steps leading up to the banning of wood as a gradual, evolutionary process. Each step takes the Earth closer and closer to a complete ban. Broome often wrote stories that contained the life histories of his protagonist. A tale like this one can be considered the "life history" of an entire planet. Broome's tales containing a biography of a single hero often end with the hero taking some radical action, one that puts him at opposition to conventional ideas or values. Broome shows how the hero arrived at this position. Usually the hero starts out by sharing society's ideas, but gradually goes through a step by step process of turning away from them. Each step is small, carefully motivated, and illustrated by realistic, plausible detail that allows the reader to feel what the step was like. Similarly, in "The Wooden World War" Broome takes us on a series of plausible small stages, showing the decline in the use of wood. Each stage is illustrated by a concrete action in the life of some "typical" Earth person. Broome starts out with the "conventional" idea, our current love of wood, and shows how this gradually changes over the centuries to its complete opposite, a total ban.

Mail Rider to the Stars (1958). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. This tale is about a lone rocket pilot who delivers mail to far flung planets, despite all obstacles. It is notable for being one of the first depictions of a "black hole" in fiction.

Probably one of the best features of this story is Sid Greene's art. There is some of his distinctive future architecture. There are also some good shots of the rocket ship zooming around through the asteroids. The combination of the curving lines of the rocket exhaust and the circles of the asteroids, makes for some pleasing visual patterns. Such scenes of space flight often recur in Greene's tales. Also notable: the overhead shot of the planet Soria, showing fields and cities. Such overhead shots were typical of Greene. They show a planet in almost schematic form, with its buildings, roads, bridges looking like the miniature structures people put on electric train sets and model cities. Greene tends to emphasize the alien or futuristic quality of the planet's architecture in the stories, with spectacularly curved or designed buildings that look utterly unconventional by today's standards. These overhead schematic shots are some of the richest, most inventive artwork in Greene. Other Greene fiction with overhead vistas: "The Prisoner of Space X" (Strange Adventures #78, March 1957).

Behind the Space Curtain (1959). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. This story tells about a promoter who tries to hire a musician who lives on a planet that has been closed off by its government. The script is by John Broome, who was already busy writing the early Flash and Green Lantern tales. The tale clearly is inspired by the real life problems of musicians of that era in the Soviet bloc, and their difficulties communicating with the outside world. The Soviet dictators kept their people prisoners behind what was known as the Iron Curtain: the origin of the name "the Space Curtain" in the tale. The story also refers at the end to Admiral Perry, and his opening up of Japan to the outside world in the 19th Century. Broome would go on to write a major story about refugees trying to leave a dictatorial society, "The Secret of the Golden Thunderbolts" (Green Lantern #2, September-October 1960).

The raffish promoter is a type we do not always see in comics. He is clearly both a sophisticated man of the world, with lots of experience at putting on shows and concerts, both high brow and low brow, and something of a low life, a man who is always gambling on the success of the events he promotes. Greene' s illustration depicts him as 40ish, a man who has been around the block a few times. Broome gave Green Lantern a "sophisticated" background, and he is clearly at home at writing about such a world. The concert artist is young, and has the serious refined look of a classical musician. He plays an instrument, the Crystalet, that is a combination xylophone and light organ. The 1950's were a time of real life interest in "light music", such as the Vortex Concerts (1957 - 1959) put on by filmmaker Jordan Belson in San Francisco.

Sid Greene's art rises to new heights here in its depiction of futuristic architecture on the planets of Neptune and Athena. The architecture is beautiful, featuring serene, friendly looking squares full of futuristic buildings and trees. Unlike many of today's grim visions of the future, it looks like a wonderful place to live. Green liked buildings with spiral ramps around them. He also depicted rising spirals as decorations, and towers with repeated flat disks or rings on them. His buildings often contained repeated, planar projections, all short, flange like extensions of the surface. These projections will be numerous, and packed very close together. They could be oriented either vertically or horizontally on the buildings.

Glory Ride to Pluto (1960). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. When teleportation makes spaceships obsolete, an aging pilot and his son take the spaceship Queen Astra out for one last run. Sweet, sentimental tale that is emotionally satisfying. The son wants to be a spaceship pilot, a profession that is about to become officially extinct. He is one of many young men in Broome whose choice of a profession is in conflict with society, which does not seem to want to let them do anything.

This story resembles Broome's "The Wooden World War" in that it deals with a technology becoming obsolete. There is an interesting paradox in the story, in that today we think of spaceships as a futuristic technology, something that is yet to come, while this story is already looking ahead to their days of obsolescence.

Mystery of the Synthetic Man (1960). Writer: John Broome. Art: Sid Greene. This story deals with racial prejudice between humans and androids, the synthetic men of the title. It sends a strong Civil Rights message. Broome would introduce the first non-white continuing character in a Silver Age superhero comic two months later, the Eskimo Thomas Kamalku in Green Lantern. Broome clearly had one of the deepest on going commitments to political relevance in the Silver Age in his stories. He was especially committed to the insulted and injured: victims of racial persecution, and refugees. His is a humane vision, one that is greatly needed today.

Stories Related to Green Lantern

Prisoner of the Electric Eye (1959). Writer: John Broome. Art: Gil Kane. To help prevent an interstellar war, an escape artist faces his greatest challenge: to escape from a room guarded by four cones of light. This short but satisfying tale is by the writer-artist team that went on to create Green Lantern. The cones here are typical of the geometric shapes used by Kane. Also, the fact that the tale revolves around beams of light recalls all the rays emitted by Green Lantern's power ring.

In Green Lantern, the character that is constantly being placed in "escape proof" traps is Sinestro. Sinestro is a bad guy, whereas this tale's hero is a good guy. However, this story's magician hero actually looks a lot like Sinestro. Neither man at all looks like Gil Kane's classically handsome heroes. Instead, both men have a sophisticated, "satanic" look, one appropriate to certain kinds of stage magicians. There are also several villains in Green lantern who are actually stage performers, before they turned to a life of crime. These men also recall to a degree the hero of this tale.

Both Gardner Fox and John Broome regularly included traps in Adam Strange and Green Lantern, respectively. Fox's traps tend to be designed to kill the hero. By contrast, Broome's traps seem designed to keep someone permanently a prisoner, but not to kill him. Green Lantern was always catching Sinestro, and putting him in apparently escape proof cells, one designed to hold him permanently. When we next see Sinestro, usually in a later issue of Green Lantern, he has miraculously escaped. Soon we learn the simple but very clever gimmick he used to do this escape. These tales form little sf mysteries: the reader is challenged to figure out how Sinestro could possibly escape from his new cell. In this tale, the sf mystery element is even more heightened. The reader is actually challenged at one point by the narrator to determine how the hero will escape, based on clues within the story. This is similar to the "Challenge to the Reader" found in Ellery Queen detective novels, occurring when both the reader and the detective have enough clues to solve the mystery.

Raiders of the Waterless World (1959). Writer: John Broome. Art: Gil Kane. A spaceman carrying water to another planet is the only one able to help when the planet is subject to a sneak attack by war mongers. This story is one of the most "space opera" like of all tales in Mystery in Space. The story is especially notable for its beautiful art. Kane does an excellent job with his space ship interior. Such interiors tend to be very elaborate in Kane's work, full of complex machinery, instrument panels, monitor windows, which are often circular. The elaborateness of the interiors make them look far more believable as real high tech space ships than many other artists' conceptions, which often seem too simplistic. Many of his stories show the space ship interior in just one or two panels; however in this tale we see it from many different angles and views throughout the story.

Broome's stories are full of life histories. In this tale, the hero has one, a very elaborate series of events that stretch back into his childhood. And at the end of the story, we also see the next steps in the heroes' life. But other characters in the tale have life histories, too. For example, his commanding officer at the Naval Academy: we briefly learn how he received that position. Broome seems to readily resort to such life stories as an aid to characterization. We see not just how people are, but how they became that way. One might also point out that the water itself in the story has a "life history". It is not in its conventional form in the story. We learn first how it got that way, and why it is being carried in space. Then we see new things that happen to it. It is almost a character, like the hero and his commanding officer. It goes through the same sort of series of evolutionary steps as the people in the story, being gradually transformed from something conventional to something very eccentric and unusual: the typical progression of Broome's humans. This evolution from the conventional and the ordinary to the extraordinary is Broome's typical path. At its end, the characters are at their most imaginative, their most original, and most influential and significant. They are also sometimes at their greatest opposition to society.

The hero of this story is one of Kane's classically good looking leading man types. He reminds one strongly of Green Lantern himself. Like Green Lantern, he is also a pilot. Kane uses many of the same gestures and body postures with this hero that he later used with Green Lantern, especially while in his Hal Jordan identity. One panel shows the hero rubbing the back of his neck while mildly perplexed: this is a classic GL gesture. Another GL like posture shows him crouching over the instrument panel of his space ship. As in the Green Lantern stories, the figure of the hero is at the center of many of the compositions, the focus of Kane's attention.

Some of the effects at the end of the story remind one of the figures Green Lantern made with his power ray.

The hero, Sgt. Carr Malcolm, wears a space pilot's uniform that looks fairly similar to Green Lantern's clothes. It has Sergeant's stripes on its sleeves, but they point oddly downward, looking a little less macho. We also see a flashback to a football game in the hero's childhood. The football uniforms are old-fashioned, like something out of the 1930's. But they are combined with boots, like those of a comic book super-hero. This is typical of the costumes in the sf comics: they combine real life clothes with comic book traditions. The stadium is also traditional looking, but the lights on the football field are Kane's futuristic machinery.

Kane has set this story in a world where everything is a geometric abstraction, except the human figures. The football helmets are spherical, like the water globes. The helmets have complex curves on their surface. The water globes have three intersecting circles of various radii on them, plus a crescent shaped shadow bounded by two circular arcs. Spheres are a key image in Kane's Constructivist design. They almost always have circles inscribed on their surface. A beautiful panel in the story shows the hero holding a water sphere in his hand. It evokes classic images, of people holding globes in wonder.

The alien spaceships are also of complex design. Like much of Kane's work, they emphasize circles. They are largely flat, circular disks. At their rear they have two large vertical flanges, gripping the surface of the horizontal disk, containing the jets. These flanges are rounded with complex, 3D curves. Kane displays them at several different angles, and from the front and rear of the ship; they look surprisingly different from all these views. This demonstrates the complexity of 3D design.

Kane's futuristic machinery is full of components that look like contemporary traffic lights. These are circular patches, recessed within a cylindrical tube, that have a semi-circular projection overhanging their front, like the shield above a red or green traffic light. As in contemporary lights, sometimes the circular patch has horizontal slats over it, sometimes it does not. Such lights are very common on street corners, but otherwise this is a design that is little used in our contemporary world. Kane employs them everywhere, on every kind of machinery. They add a unique looking touch to his elaborate machines. They look distinctly different from what we are used to today.

"Terra" of the Spaceways (1960). Writer: John Broome. Art: Gil Kane. A handsome spaceship repairman romances a beautiful but haughty heiress. The couple in this tale recall Hal Jordan and Carol Ferris in Green Lantern. Like Carol, the woman here is the heiress to a great manufacturing company. Carol's firm made airplanes; the one in this tale makes spaceships. Like Hal, the hero here is employed by the woman's company, and is a subordinate of the woman. Both men are noticeably good looking, and rely on their personal charm in their wooing. However, there are some differences between the two couples, too. Hal is a successful test pilot. He always maintains a middle class status, dressing in sharp suits. By contrast here, the hero is a working class man, and his job of spaceship repairman lacks the glamour of Hal's. And while Carol actually ran her firm, and was a terrific businesswoman, the heiress here seems to be little more that one of the idle rich, cruising around on her space yacht. She is haughty and considers herself of a class above the repairman, while Carol tended to treat Hal as more of a social equal.

The story shows a refreshing lack of malice. The hero eventually impresses the heroine, but there is no Admirable Crichton style of "putting the woman in her place" here. Instead, the couple learns to relate more on a position of social equality. This is closer to Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934) and other 1930's screwball comedies.

The hero's futuristic suit is very close to that worn by Green Lantern. This is somewhat unusual for Kane: he had a whole repertory of futuristic costumes, and rarely reused Green Lantern's "look" in other tales. Here, there are curving designs rippling over muscles and the shoulders. Features that recalls Green Lantern: the gauntlets in both cases have tight fitting sleeves. Also noteworthy is the hero's pet, the cute little mon-cat. It has features related to Kane's comic "monsters": big eyes and long arms. Here, however, these alien features are not on a large monster, but on a small little pet.

Gil Kane and Space Adventure

The Sleeping War (1960). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Gil Kane. An empty star ship suddenly appears near Earth, the gift of aliens; a troop of scientists and Space Marines use it to make an interstellar flight. Gardner Fox's Mystery in Space tales put way too much emphasis on future wars. However, even a pacifist like myself can enjoy the adventures of these Space Marines. Gardner is clearly of two minds about fighting. The story pays homage to pacifist ideals. The villains are evil war mongers who attack helpless people with high tech weapons; the Marines disarm them and clean up their men with good old fashioned fisticuffs, which they claim is the traditional Marine way of fighting. At the end of the story the bad guys are disarmed, then allowed to join the futuristic UN of the era.

This story has outstanding art by Gil Kane. Kane has a distinctive style of space craft, as seen here and in the origin stories of Green Lantern. His star ships tend to have long cylindrical bodies, tapering to sleek rounded cones at the front end. Towards the base, there are two rounded rectangular flanges on either side. These rounded rectangles have nearly flat upper and lower surfaces. They make the star craft bilaterally symmetric, with a distinct upper and lower side. The space craft is shiny and metallic. It is hard to imagine anything more phallic looking.

The uniforms of the Space Marines are also outstanding. They are green, and have white sleevelets, reminding one of the white gloves Green Lantern wears over his green uniform. There are white cross straps and high stiff collars. The Space Marines have shiny silver helmets. The Marine Commander has a silver dove with outstretched wings on his helmet. This is typical of the mixed messages sent by the tale about fighting. The dove is a traditional symbol of peace. And these Marines are out to attack the thing they hate more than anything else: "warmongers". However, this is the most macho looking dove you've ever seen. It is a spectacular piece of imagery, and one that makes the Commander look incredibly sharp. One suspects that Kane is on to something here. This might be the perfect uniform for today's peace keepers, a role that soldiers are increasing asked to perform.

Other parts of the story emphasize the geometric objects out of which Kane built his Constructivist architecture. The space ship has a circular viewing port, through which we see an equally round Earth. This panel, which shows a Space Marine flying the star ship by grasping a lever and pushing a button, is one of Kane's most gratifying fantasy images. Also noteworthy are the Marines' tents, which are truncated spheres with circular flaps, one of Kane's most geometric images.

Mystery Message From Fort Nova (#67, May 1961). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Gil Kane. Major David Manders of the Solar Legion of Space tries to get a new weapon he invented through to a besieged outpost on another planet. This sf story draws on French Foreign Legion fiction. This minor tale shows how deeply Gardner Fox was getting into sf war stories in Mystery in Space. The tale's chief merit is Gil Kane's art. It is similar in many ways to that of his earlier story, "The Sleeping War" (1960). The uniforms of the Solar Legion are similar to those of the Space Marines. Cross straps, stiff high collars, helmets, belts are all features in common. The uniforms are more brightly colored than the Space Marines' green: the boots are red here, not brown, and the gauntlet-like sleevelets are gold and shiny. The helmets here have flanges and visors. They have a sideburn like structure that goes down on the side of the head, leaving an opening for the ear - this is pretty cool looking. The helmets also have a cloth covering hanging down over the back of the head; this is similar to the traditional caps of the French Foreign Legion. Like many of the space uniforms in Mystery in Space, this has features that recall some tradition real life Earth uniform, combined with features typical of comic book costumes.

Kane also includes a Legion spaceship, the Flammarion, with a similar design to that in the earlier story. The enemy here also have a spaceship; it is more bluntly conical in its two parts. Like most of Kane's space ships, it is very long, narrow and nearly cyclindrical. The Earth ship is rounded at the tip and more biomorphic; the conical enemy ship is more purely geometric and Constructivist. It too is extremely macho looking. Its sheer aggressiveness is not suitable for a good guys' ship; such naked, pointed aggression is usually reserved for villains in fiction.

Gardner Fox SF Tales

Kidnapped in Space (1952). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Gil Kane. An Earth atomic scientist is kidnapped by aliens, who demand he tell them Earth's atomic secrets. This tale is explicitly structured as an sf mystery, one with clues which the reader is challenged to solve. It is brief and well done. The hero goes through one of Fox's "trip to another planet" cycles: he starts out on Earth, is taken to outer space by powerful forces over which he has no control, and winds up on Earth again at the end of the tale. This is the paradigm of the Adam Strange stories, and other such individual Fox tales as "The Perfect Planet" (1952). As in other Fox mysteries, the hero has to penetrate what is illusion and what is reality.

The Case of the Counterfeit Humans (1952). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: John Giunta. Aliens on another planet disguise themselves as exact duplicates of an Earth astronaut, thus confusing his partner as to which one is the real human. This is a brief, clever story that thoroughly explores the difficulty of telling the real human apart from his impersonators. The ideas in this tale would be frequently revived in both the Superman family and the Schwartz magazines: see "The Plot Against Jimmy Olsen" (Jimmy Olsen #71, September 1963) and "Trail of the False Green Lanterns" (Flash #143, March 1964). The story involves Fox's familiar theme of doubles.

The Perfect Planet (1952). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Frank Giacoia. An Earthman trying to invent an interstellar drive accidentally goes to a planet where all his day dreams mysteriously come true. This story anticipates Lem's Solaris, although it is much cheerier! Frank Giacoia's art showing super-beings here is excellent. I also liked the hero's uniform. With its big collar, epaulettes, striped trousers and circle emblem on the chest, it is pretty cool looking.

This tale is structurally similar to Fox's "The Dream Adventurer", in the next issue. These tales form an early example of a Fox cycle. As usual, the hero ends up where he began, at the conclusion of the cycle. The cycle has these steps:

Both stories start out with a hero who is moderately dissatisfied with his Earth life.
Both move next to a highly satisfying dream world, in which the hero gets to live out his most pleasurable day dreams. This fantasy world is solipsistic: the hero is the only real person there; everything else is an illusion. These tales are very close to modern ideas of Virtual Reality.
The hero then leaves his pleasant fantasy, and goes back permanently to the real world.
Here he makes a major scientific discovery, and has a strong positive effect on the lives of the people around him.
He gets the Solar Medal of Honor.
The hero resumes his daily life, with a new perspective on reality.

The Dream Adventurer (1952). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Bob Oksner. A man who is too weak physically to travel to other planets experiences them through virtual reality-like "dream movies"; later he innovates as a scientist.

The hero's moving in and out of the dream world resembles Adam Strange's passage to Rann and back. The hero here fantasizes about fighting villains and rescuing the heroine, just as Adam Strange does on Rann. It is perhaps odd that what is presented as reality in the Adam Strange tales is constructed as fantasy here. Fox would not repeat this virtual reality approach in later tales; instead in Adam Strange and other later stories, he would insist on the hero's adventures as being real.

One can see Fox's pacifist convictions here. The hero fights in his dream sequences, but does scientific invention in reality. One sees a message here about what is valuable in the real world: science, not war and combat.

Interplanetary Enemy Number One (1952). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: John Giunta. A Earthman is put on trial for murder before a jury composed of aliens from many planets. This is a combination of the sf story and the courtroom mystery. It is well done, and one wishes there were more such sf-mystery hybrids. The ingenious trick his defense attorney uses has nothing to do with science fiction, and would have worked just as well for Perry Mason. Fox wisely keeps the reader from knowing whether the hero is innocent or guilty till the end of the story, thus adding suspense and mystery. The solution to the mystery is related to, but different from, one Fox would use in his Adam Strange tale, "The Duel of the Two Adam Stranges" (#59, May 1960). One small flaw: Fox does not give the reader quite enough clues to deduce the solution.

John Giunta once again shows his skill with aliens. They always look dignified and intelligent in his stories, as well as strikingly different from Earth people. He tends to show aliens as members of highly civilized societies. His stories tend to have a whole range of alien beings - this tale, like Giunta's "The Boy Who Saved the Solar System" (Strange Adventures #95, August 1958), shows beings from the entire solar system.

The Unknown Spaceman (1953). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Bob Oksner. When aliens are about to land on Earth for the first time, everyone begins to speculate about what they look like. Clever story which goes through a huge variety of imagined alien creatures in just a few pages. The human characters in the tale are in the position of Fox and Oksner, trying to come up with ideas about what aliens might be like. This gives the tale a reflexive or recursive quality. It is the sort of brief, imaginative philosophical fable that one associates with Borges. There is an attempt to include people of many races in the tale; among the human characters are people from India, and Navajos. The end of the story also contains a lesson against prejudice. Alien beings in sf stories of the 1950's and 1960's frequently stood in allegorically for people of other races.

Two night sky scenes drawn by Bob Oksner are memorable: one on page 2, showing trees on a hill, with the night sky in the background, and a final shot of the monument on page 6, with the stars in the background.

Riddle of the Vanishing Earthmen (#32, June-July 1956). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Sid Greene. Aliens threaten to destroy Earth with an advanced weapon. This is a not-bad little tale of interstellar adventure. Earth people show ingenuity, not force, in their response to this situation, in Fox's traditional manner.

The tale's most interesting feature is Sid Greene's art. The splash shows an aerial landscape of the alien planet. Unlike many such Greene views, this one contains not cities, but chains of mountains over the planet's surface. The zigzag mountain ridges form pleasing, almost abstract patterns of design, that remind one a bit of abstract-expressionist paintings. The story contains some later aerial views as well.

Surprise Package Planet (1958). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Murphy Anderson. Captain Jenkins and his crew have a series of misadventures after they land on a deserted planet. This story falls into two parts: the first deals with the city discovered on the planet, the second with metals on the planet. Each part is relatively independent of the other, and has its own plot. They are similar in tone, however, being complexly plotted sf adventures that lead to frustrating and bewildering experiences for the Earth explorers. Each part is based on its own Fox cycle: a circular series of events that come full circle to their original state at the end. For an in-depth discussion of Fox cycles, please see the article on Adam Strange. Fox frequently used such cycles to construct his stories. The first half's plot is ingenious. In its complexity, bringing in a historical series of events, it recalls "The Sleeping Peril of Mars" (1961), although it covers a much shorter period of time. In its conflict between surface appearance and underlying reality, it anticipates Fox' Star Rovers series to come.

Anderson does a good job with the Captain and crew. They are typical of his macho men, here looking muscular in some of Anderson's best space suits. The Captain's brush-cutted hair is always visible, even under his glass domed breathing helmet, while his crew wear solid helmets with repeating sector ridges on the helmet flange. The Captain and his men look highly capable and tough, which adds to the quiet comedy of their endlessly unexpected encounters with strange phenomena on the planet. These men of action would clearly much prefer to encounter a fight, rather than the intellectually puzzling, jaw-droppingly mystifying and surreal events with which they keep having to deal.

Anderson's futuristic city is also good (p2). It is full of curving ramps, and follows Anderson's own individual traditions of such cities, as in his "The Doom From Station X" (1953). There are later interesting illustrations of the city as well (p4,5), the latter with a rocket blasting off nearby.

Mystery of the Moon Sniper (1958). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Carmine Infantino. Based on a cover by: Gil Kane. A colonist from Antares makes himself the double of an Earth scientist, then tries to take over Earth. Everything in this story works smashingly. The tale reflects Fox's theme of the double.

Infantino's art has the multi-media features of his work on The Flash. Especially notable here: a trip into the Fifth Dimension, a place where everything is represented by sketchy art. This conveys an impression of how immaterial and vague everything is in this other dimension. The art looks exactly like a traditional "rough sketch", something we are not used to seeing in the realistic world of the comic book. The transition to the other dimension is interesting too, the brilliant energy represented by radiating lines and the hero's moving hair. I also liked the depiction of the starry skies of outer space, and a star map on a wall. Antares has one of Infantino's Art Deco cities, and the colonist builds a tower on Earth not unlike the Potsdam Tower that seems to have inspired so much of Infantino's architectural work.

Secret of the Scarecrow World (1958). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Carmine Infantino. Based on a cover by: Gil Kane. A new teleportation device accidentally leaves a giant scarecrow off Earth's North Pole. This story shows many Fox techniques and themes. It deals with the invention of teleportation, and its use in space travel, a theme of Fox's Adam Strange tales and other works: Adam Strange was making his debut at the same time this story appeared. It features a married couple who work together as scientists, as in Fox's Space Museum stories, and elsewhere.

The story features a Fox cycle - for a discussion of Fox cycles, please see the article on Adam Strange. Here, teleportation from one location to another, then back again to the original location, is a complete cycle. As usual in Fox cycles, this leaves the original situation unchanged at the end. This cycle is close to the zeta-beam cycle in the Adam Strange stories, which also centers on teleportation between planets. In both cycles, there are strange features that affect the teleported half way through the cycle: charging with radiation in the zeta-beam cycle, change of size here. These cycles are also used in similar structural ways. Here Earth faces a menace (an interplanetary invasion), just as the planet Rann typically faces a menace in the Adam Strange tales. And the hero here uses the existing cycle to "interfere" with this menace, just as Adam Strange often uses his zeta-beam cycle to interfere with and defeat menaces to Rann.

Another structural use of the cycle recalling other Fox tales: the story includes a "change of protagonist for the cycle, on a massive scale", as in the Adam Strange tale "Planets of Peril" (Mystery in Space #90, March 1964).

This story also deals with another Fox concept: the cycle with a flaw in it. The time travel in "The Two-Way Time Traveler" (Strange Adventures #143, August 1962) is also flawed. Fox's dialogue actually uses the word "bug" to describe this engineering problem: an early use of this computer term in a fiction story.

While the story is based on a cover by Gil Kane, it twists the cover situation around, giving it a different meaning than it has in Kane's cover. It is more a rationalization of the cover, a plot dreamed up to "explain" it, than a straightforward use of the covers idea as a story premise. This is typical of the way Fox did not always closely use Kanes cover concepts.

The Runaway Space-Train (1959). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Gil Kane. Based on a cover by Gil Kane. A train full of Earth tourists is transported to an alien planet; meanwhile aliens impersonate them on Earth and continue their tour. This light hearted story is one of the sunniest and most delightful Mystery in Space tales. The story has a two part construction: the Earth people undergo a tour of the galaxy, while the disguised aliens undergo a similar tour of Earth. Both of these events are mirror images of each other. This continues Fox's theme of doubles, characters who mirror each other's condition and behavior. As in many Fox tales, such doubles involve actual impersonation. The aliens have only good motives: they want to take a tour of Earth, and this is their standard way of seeing other planets. It is often the good characters in Fox who impersonate, not the bad guys. The impersonator is often the good guy hero of the story.

Each tour group is attacked by bad guys. The unexpected presence of aliens on the Earth train and humans among the outer space tour group causes these twin attacks to fail. This plot development also follows Gardner Fox's personal approaches of story construction. First of all, each attack by bad guys is part of a well defined cycle. For example, when robbers hold up the train on Earth, the attack follows the time worn script of such hold-ups as seen in countless Western movies. The reader knows every step of this cycle, and knows exactly what to expect of such a train robbery under "normal" circumstances. These circumstances are not normal, however: there are aliens on board the train. These "out of place" characters cause the train-robbery cycle to go awry in delightful ways. This use of out of place characters who interfere with a cycle is a Gardner Fox paradigm of plot construction. He employs it above all in his Adam Strange tales, where the presence of Adam Strange typically interferes with the cycles of the menaces attacking Rann. The article on Adam Strange discusses this in depth.

This tale contains one of Gil Kane's most elaborate alien cities. He often uses repeated elements in his architecture: a seies of curved forms repeated again and again in a row, for example. One of the main buildings is a large sphere, with various planar extensions. It looks a great deal like one of El Lissitzky's Prouns.

The Magic Lamp From Space (1960). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Murphy Anderson. A scientist finds a magic lamp on another planet, which he uses to battle an evil green cloud which destroys planetary life. Fox and the other Mystery in Space writers often evoked legends and myths in their tales; here the hero finds a "magic" lamp that can grant wishes, just like Aladdin's lamp. The lamp works off principles of alien science: it is not really "magical". Like everything else in Mystery in Space, it is science fiction, not fantasy or supernatural fiction. Use of the lamp involves a typical Gardner Fox cycle. The hero has to transform himself as part of this cycle. Later, at the end of the story, a mass group of protagonists undergo the lamp cycle: a typical Fox use of a cycle in his plot constructions. Still, it makes for a very startling effect, as always in a Fox tale where the cycle protagonists change into a mass group.

The alien planet buildings in the story show Murphy Anderson's interest in classical architecture. The buildings tend to be fronted by columns, topped with arches or low domes, like that of Ancient Rome's Pantheon. The effect is very similar to that of Ancient Greece or Rome. However, the buildings are much larger and more solid looking: they are the products of an advanced alien civilization. There are many towers, and many of the buildings have features of the modern Bauhaus school. Background shots of the city often show a skyline of buildings in silhouette, a common feature as well in Carmine Infantino. There are differences between the two artists, however: Infantino's cities are fully Art Deco, whereas the only Deco feature in Anderson are the rings on some of the buildings. The towers in Anderson's silhouettes are all carefully separate from each other, too, unlike Infantino.

Clothes in Anderson include his typically elegant, form fitting space suits. Soldiers in the tale are in Guardsman like uniforms, with helmets, gloves, belted tunics and striped trousers - there is a bit of a comic opera effect.

Mutiny in High Space (1960). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Sid Greene. This story deals with a mutiny on a space ship. It is in the tradition of such popular 1950's works as The Caine Mutiny (195X); as in that novel, Fox includes an elaborate trial scene. However, the sf background of the story allows Fox to introduce some ingenious plot twists. Fox has also coined some lingo for space flight.

Greene's art contains one of his elaborate outer space scenes: here it is a swirling region full of cyclones. The uniforms combine space suit features with elements of traditional sailor suits; they are a clever visual pun. Like most of Greene's space uniforms, they have a rounded quality. Greene's space suits tend to be less like 19th Century European army officers than are Gil Kane's. The men usually wear slipper like shoes, not boots, and the collars are usually not the stiff military collars of Kane's. Greene's collars tend to be wide, and follow the curve of the shoulders and chest, not erect. They tend to be rounded, and look as if they are stuffed. They look very firm, like the pillow or arm rest of a sofa. All of the clothes worn in Greene tend to be very rounded: the shoes, the collars, the arms and chest. One sees muscles under these clothes components, each of which bulges out to form a three dimensional rounded surface.

Weapon of the Giant Brains (#65, February 1961). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Sid Greene. Space-Fleet Admiral Jeffrey Cooper seeks help from a planet full of advanced brains that live underground; they request a flask of Earth sea water in return. He is trying to stave off a group of evil alien invaders called The Strann. This is a not bad tale. The Strann remind one of The Shing, in such Ursula K. Le Guin novels as City of Illusions (1967). Greene's art contains an impressive picture of the vault filled with all the brains. He also does a good job of illustrating Cooper. Although our hero is already an Admiral, he looks about 30! He is clearly every boy's fantasy of a space traveling hero - he wears a space suit through the entire tale. I enjoy this sort of wish fulfillment, vicarious adventure, too.

Our Home is in the Stars (#65, February 1961). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Carmine Infantino. A young man is trained to have a "homing" instinct, like a pigeon. This starts out as an interesting idea, but the tale eventually degenerates into militarism and a lot of fighting. Fox' heroes often spend their whole lives searching for things. Each step takes them a little closer. A moral is being drawn, about the nature of scientific search, and the endless perseverance it requires. These stories also double as bildungsromans, tales of young men growing up, although Fox does not lean on this aspect heavily.

The best part of the story is the Art Deco house the young man's family lives in. We see two views, from the front and the side. It has curvilinear shapes, and is really cool looking. The story is set a little bit into Earth's future, and Infantino is projecting what a typical futuristic Earth dwelling will look like.

The Language-Master of Space (1961). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Sid Greene. A young expert in linguistics has many space adventures, including tricking a group of aliens who are trying to invade a peaceful planet. This story is narrated in the first person by its young scientist hero; this is a pattern Fox and Greene will repeat later in "Next Year -- Andromeda" (1963). Our hero has an intense wanderlust, and a desire to visit as many planets as possible, and to learn as much about their languages as possible.

Sid Greene has an astonishing variety of space ships in his tales. The central region of the star ship will often consist of more than one component, arranged in a sequence along the main axis of the ship. A space ship can consist of two large components, or of up to a dozen small ones. Often there is a smaller component inserted in a depression in a larger one. The effect is something like an orange juice squeezer, with its central cone emerging from a round basin inside the larger bowl. Each component tends to be radially symmetric. One can consider each of these components to be "surfaces of revolution", the result of revolving a curve around the axis. Sometimes these components are straightforward cylinders or cones; more often they are the surface of revolution generated by what are themselves complex curves.

Greene uses similar shapes on weapons. These weapons are usually the size of modern day tanks, or larger; they are not hand held weapons. They tend to be made up of similar series of components, each radially symmetric and the result of the rotation of a complex curve. The weapons also use the "insertion of a smaller component (higher on the axis) inside a circular depression in a larger component (lower on the axis)" construction used by the space ships. There is one common set of Greene design principles here that are applied to large constructed objects, whether space ships or weapons.

Usually on Greene's star ships, there are three projections, sometimes flanges, sometimes rockets. Unlike Gil Kane, whose space ships tend to be bilaterally symmetric with an upper and lower surface; Greene's tend to be tri-symmetric. Most of the main components of the ships are round, and fully radially symmetric; off these center regions, there usually are trilateral projections, such as flanges, rockets and so on. These projections can be elaborate; the central cylinder will have rockets attached, which in turn will have flanges, for instance. Sometimes even the flanges will have flanges. The rockets tend to be large, radially symmetric series of components themselves. They use the same "insertion" design principles found in the central axis of the space ships, and it Greene's weapons. This introduces the principal of recursion into Greene's construction. A space ship can be made of large components in its central axis; projecting along it in three directions are three rockets, each on which also consists of a series of components, smaller in radius but following the same design principles.

There are two other common design features of Greene ships. "Language-Master" has a star ship with a curving ramp; this starts at a door in the middle of the ship, and spirals down to the ground. Secondly, most Greene space ships have a large number on the side. This tends to look like the serial number of a 20th Century Airplane. It tends to be linked to the owner's name. If a character is named Smith, his spaceship will be numbered SM-81; if Jones, J-25.

The Sleeping Peril of Mars (1961). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Sid Greene. A plot about sleeping sickness on Mars intersects with a tale about an alien invasion. Fox had a fascination with stories about mass sleep descending on an entire population. This is one of his most elaborate and complex. The attacks of sleep can be considered a cycle, in the Fox sense. The cycle consists of being awake, undergoing a long sleep of many years that interrupts daily life, then waking up again good as new. As usual in Fox cycles, the state of the protagonist at the end is the same as at the beginning. Here Fox goes through nearly four complete cycles, ringing every possible change on the protagonists the sleep affects - another Fox tradition of story construction. Intersecting with this is another cycle about alien invasion. Using one cycle to affect another cycle is a Fox tradition: here the sleep gives our hero a chance to outwit alien invaders. As one can gather from this description, Fox manages to pack a huge amount of plot into just a few pages here. Readers who've spent the last ten years reading nothing but modernistic short stories in which, essentially, nothing happens, will find this tale giving them especial cultural shock.

Sid Greene's art is at its delirious best here. He manages to trot out nearly every signature theme of his personal style here, and portray them at their most dynamic. The huge variety of Martian space ships in one panel (page 3) remind us that no two Greene space ships are ever alike. The first two pages of the story show us one of Greene's modernistic plazas. The hero's hospital room on page 4 is full of similarly modernistic tables and lamps. Page 3 shows a strange Martian landscape full of rocks; page 7 has one of Greene's complex outer space scenes, with curling trails left behind by the star ships.

Captain Baboon's Space War (1961). Writer: Gardner Fox. Art: Mike Sekowsky. A man with the ability to change minds with animals goes undercover as a baboon to thwart an invasion by a dictator. This is an entertaining tale that paints a powerful negative portrait of a war-mongering dictator and his thuggish bodyguards. Dictators were a major worry in the year 1961, and Fox gives a full picture to his young readers as to why he finds them so objectionable.

Fox's protagonist is a former Earth military hero who has grown "tired of war", and who has started a new peacetime career among the stars. The ambiguity of this character summarizes Fox's contradictory attitudes towards war and peace. On the one hand, the character expresses pacifist attitudes of disgust for war, and suggests that mature vision will reject it. On the other hand, he is a full fledged military hero whose youthful exploits are seen in flashback.

Fox's character's new career of spreading plant life among the stars is explicitly suggested by the Earth legend of Johnny Appleseed. Fox often included events in his tales suggested by Greek mythology; here he is using American folklore.

Our hero's ability to exchange minds with animals is a Fox cycle, in the formal sense. He can switch back to his own body again, and like all Fox cycles, the protagonist is in the same position at the end as at the beginning. As in many Fox stories, we see several complete cycles in the course of the tale. The cycle also keys in with Fox's theme of doubles: here the hero and his animal alter egos form doubles who trade places with each other.

Mike Sekowsky is well known today for drawing the Justice League of America. He also did the first stories of Adam Strange in Showcase, before Carmine Infantino took over the character. Here his art is most notable for drawing the space men who are the hero's former military colleagues and friends. They are extremely macho, and evoke an era in American life and its conceptions of manhood, with their space suits and their crew cuts.

Mann Rubin Tales

Cowboy on Mars (1952). Writer: Mann Rubin. Art: Jim Mooney. A cowboy, a member of the Cattleman's Protective Association, is transported to Mars, where he enters a Martian rodeo and tracks bad guys. Entertaining blend of the Western and the sf story. Rubin left an opening at the end, suggesting that the cowboy might return to Mars and fight bad guys again, but as far as I can tell, no such sequel ever appeared. This story shares many formal elements with Rubin's next story for the magazine, "The World Where Dreams Come True". Both are about human heroes who are accidentally transported to another planet, Mars here, Venus in "World". In both tales, the hero gets involved with a contest, one that involves a lot of imaginatively developed alien animals: the rodeo here, the Olympics in "World".

The World Where Dreams Come True (1952). Writer: Mann Rubin. Art: Alex Toth. Sf writer Marty Reed is transported to Venus, where mobster gamblers exploit his prophetic dreams to predict racing outcomes. Marty Reed is the first sf writer character to make an appearance in Mystery in Space. He is the start of a long tradition of sf writers that will appear as heroes in the sf comic books, a series that will culminate with Gardner Fox's "Flash of Two Worlds" (The Flash #123, September 1961). Like his successors, he gets his story ideas through visionary means - in this case, he dreams their plots. Also like his successors, his story ideas turn out to be based on reality. All of these sf writers will eventually get involve in real life adventures, based on their talent. Unlike many of the later stories, this tale does not give a clear, logical explanation of how the writer's dreams are linked to sf realities. Despite this flaw, this pioneering story is a clever piece of fiction.

Marty Reed is clearly a glamorous projection of Mann Rubin himself: note the similarity of initials. This too is the start of a tradition: Gardner Fox will later write a story about sf writer "Gregory Farmer". All of these writers will visit an editor, and try to sell him their work. As in some of the later stories, the author is a highly glamorized figure, while the editor is a fatherly person who is much more everyday looking. In many of the later stories, the writers mainly write for comic books; here the hero writes instead for a prose science fiction magazine, "Wild Worlds". Great things happen to Marty: his editor pays him a huge bonus, enabling him to buy a new car! He looks extremely affluent anyway, in his pinstripe suit.

This story thoroughly denounces gambling, which is treated as a destructive vice. This is one of several anti-gambling tales that will appear in the DC sf magazines. All of the DC sf comic books were very straightforward about presenting their opinions on social issues.

The Seven Wonders of Space (1952). Writer: Mann Rubin. Art: Bob Oksner. An Earthman helps Jovians collect material for an exhibit, that will show the greatest wonders of the planets. This nice, low key tale is both a museum story - always a popular setting in the DC comics - and a travelogue of the Solar System, also a tradition.

Sid Gerson stories

The Chain-Gang of Space (1954). Writer: Sid Gerson. Art: Jerry Grandenetti. Based on a cover by Murphy Anderson. Kidnapped scientists mysteriously appear in cages floating in space. This story is a strange stew of incidents and sf ideas. In many ways, it is a crime thriller, with narrator Special Agent Duncan Blair of the Interplanetary Crime Commission going after kidnappers and rescuing their victims. But most of the incidents are sf adventures, set in outer space or on other planets. The big scene of the space cages is based on the cover, and is only dimly linked to the rest of the plot. If the tale lacks any overall plan or compelling unifying principle, it still is pleasant reading. The heroine who has to fight going to sleep to avoid an alien take-over will recur in "The Sleeping Doom" (Lois Lane #18, July 1960).

Similar space-cages will pop up on the cover of "Crisis on Earth-Two" (Justice League of America #22, September 1963).

Jerry Grandenetti's space-port (p3) is a sea of verticals, mixing Art Deco towers with equally vertical rockets.

The Super-Luck of Mr. Luke (1954). Writer: Sid Gerson. Art: Frank Giacoia. Luke, a prospector in the asteroids, keeps finding his claims being jumped by two crooks.

Giacoia has some vivid art in the tale. The sky full of asteroids (p5) is the sort of rich starscape favored by Mystery in Space artists. Also very nice is the map of the asteroids (p4). Comics allow such diagrammatic maps and blueprints to be intermixed with other kinds of visual material. The map is full of the same sort of small spheres as the starscape.

The Runaway World (1954). Writer: Sid Gerson. Art: Carmine Infantino. Interplanetary Insurance Investigator tries to help a society whose planet is about to be destroyed by a runaway star. This tale has a lively, logically constructed plot, with many interesting developments. While not grim, it is less farcical than many of the I.I.I. stories, as well as being more internally consistent.

The plot requires Infantino to depict the architecture of Cetus as ramshackle. He uses his typical futuristic Art Deco buildings, but has them tilting in all directions, and with windows coming loose from the buildings. Deco aspects aside, the whole thing looks like the slap-happy architecture of the Bizarro World to come.

The ten Interplanetary Insurance Investigator tales ran from #16 (October-November 1953) to #25 (April-May 1955), all created by the Sid Gerson - Carmine Infantino team. They came to an end around the same time that Space-Cabby became a regular series. Both series are humorous looks at peaceful, advanced futuristic civilizations involving space travel and aliens. Both have a series hero whose profession gets him into constant trouble. Both the profession and the future civilization in general have many characteristics drawn directly from mid-20th Century life. Neither story shows much scientific realism. Perhaps worse, neither shows any consistency in its depiction of the future; each episode begins afresh, with whatever wild concepts the writer wants to throw out, without any concern with consistency with what's gone before. This is very different from the Adam Strange tales to come, which are all carefully set against the same science fictional world. If the Space-Cabby tales have a slight edge over those of the I.I.I., it is partly because the Cabby's profession of piloting his cab among the stars is more directly science fictional, and partly because his stories tend to show more imagination.

France E. Herron stories

The Human Fishbowl (1955). Writer: France E. Herron. Art: Carmine Infantino. Based on a cover by Ruben Moreira. Martians cause bodies of water on Earth to rise up in the air against gravity; they accidentally bring humans with them.

Joe Samachson tales

There's No Place Like Earth (1956). Writer: Joe Samachson. Art: Sid Greene. The hero trails a man on the street who he suspects is an alien, and for whom the laws of nature seem to be different. Otto Binder had written some major stories dealing with worlds where the laws of science had been changed, such as "The Man Who Discovered the West Pole" (Strange Adventures #64, January 1956). Here we have a tale by Joe Samachson using the same concept. Samachson's stories often have a noir atmosphere. Here we have a "typical" urban street, and a hero trailing a suspect through it.

Samachson created J'onn J'onzz, the Manhunter from Mars. He was an alien good guy who was trapped on Earth, who had alien powers, and who went to work as a police detective. This tale has something of the same feel. Once again, we have a noir like atmosphere, involving the detective work on urban streets. And we have an alien with unusual abilities. The roles are reversed here: here it is trailed person who is the alien, whereas in J'onn J'onzz tales it is the detective who is an alien.

Fix-It Men From Outer Space (1956). Writer: Joe Samachson. Art: Carmine Infantino. Alien fix-it men stop by Earth, and repair it so that it no longer tilts on its axis. Delightful story that is almost pure science. Samachson explores the consequences of the aliens' change to Earth's characteristics. The point of view in the tale alternates between the aliens, and humans who cope with their changes. The humans and aliens never meet, which somehow adds to the story's tongue in cheek tone. This story has the same alien-human polarity as Samachson's J'onn J'onzz tales, with the aliens have much greater powers than human beings.

The story has a serious side. Many of the changes anticipate today's concerns with global warming. This story should be reprinted. It would serve as a vivid textbook for today's readers, educating them about climate change on Earth. This subject matter is shared with another sf story Samachson wrote, "The Earth-Drowners" (Strange Adventures #64, January 1956).

Stranger on Earth (1956). Writer: Joe Samachson. Art: Sid Greene. As a test, alien John Carr is sent to Earth, to see if he can find his way back to his home planet. Terrific story that is full of plot invention. The hero's situation, as an alien being trapped on modern day Earth, is similar to that of Samachson's hero J'onn J'onzz, the Manhunter from Mars. In both, the aliens have a far more advanced civilization than Earth's, and are basically good guys. In both tales, the alien winds up trying to help the people of his adopted planet. The tone of both stories is somber, but the plotting is playful and light hearted. This gives an unusual, mixed atmosphere to the stories. In both tales, the alien is made to look like an Earthman. This sort of disguise-transformation was a common feature of the sf comics. It was also personal to Samachson: again and again, he returned to the theme of aliens disguised as humans living on Earth.

Samachson's heroes all tend to be extremely resourceful. Although they are often put in dire situations, they tend to keep their cheer and come up with creative ideas.

Stories of tests used as initiations are fairly common in the comics. One thinks of the many initiation tests for members to join the Legion of Super-Heroes. This tradition was started by Otto Binder right in his Legion origin tale, "The Legion of Super-Heroes" (Adventure #247, April 1958).

Knights of the Galaxy

The Knights of the Galaxy appeared in the first eight issues of Mystery in Space. There were essentially a group of space policemen, fighting pirates and bad guys in the wilds of space, but they were organized like a medieval knighthood. The central figure here is "Lyle, Space Commando", as he is billed at the start of the tales. All of the tales were written by Robert Kanigher, with art by Carmine Infantino.

Nine Worlds to Conquer (1951). Writer: Robert Kanigher. Art: Carmine Infantino. The first Knights of the Galaxy tale. January 3, 2900: New recruit Lyle tries to prove himself worthy of becoming a member of the Knights of the Galaxy, by stopping the villain Korvo, who is threatening to disrupt all space travel. Lyle will go on to become the central character of the series. We also meet Artho, the commander of the Knights, and his courageous daughter Ora. Ora is certainly a character with plenty of feminist fire. She is idealistic, caring, and as we learn in later episodes, a gifted s