Okay, he was no Adam Strange or even a Captain Comet. But Space Ranger managed to hold down the fort in DC’s Tales of the Unexpected and then Mystery in Space for half a decade.
“DC editor Jack Schiff unveiled the Space Ranger in Showcase 15 (1958),” notes the Ultimate Encyclopedia of Comic Book Icons and Hollywood Heroes. “The Ranger had a secret identity — business heir Rick Starr — and donned a red-and-yellow space suit with a bubble helmet and a rocket pack to fight futuristic bad guys (the Jungle Beasts of Jupiter and the Alien Brat from Planet Byra, among others, with a cutesy alien pal, Cryll, by his side.”
“The use of a space helmet to disguise the hero's identity recalls the Moon Man pulp magazine short stories (1933-1937) by Frederick C. Davis,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost.
However, by the time I started reading Space Ranger, his secret identity had been largely abandoned as superfluous (a character who was always on yet another weird planet hardly needed a disguise).
Like Batman, Space Ranger had no super powers, but Cryll did, being able to transform himself into any animal, like the later Beast Boy. Since Cryll had the whole densely inhabited universe to choose from, he could essentially transform himself into anything. The Martian Manhunter’s super-powered alien pet/pal Zook was similar.
In place of powers or a utility belt, the yellow-clad, translucent-helmeted Ranger had his all-purpose multi-raygun which seemingly could emit any kind of beam: heat, ice, disintegration, and so forth. Space Ranger’s infinitely versatile raygun anticipated Space Ghost’s multi-beam power bands.
Space Ranger and his super-powered assistant echoed the pulp magazine feature Captain Future, created for Thrilling Publications by Mort Weisinger and written by Edmond Hamilton from 1940 through 1944.
“In fact, Hamilton is credited with writing the first two Space Ranger stories from (Gardner) Fox’s plots (The Great Plutonium Plot and The Robot Planet),” noted Bill Schelly in American Comic Book Chronicles.
Vincent Mariani:
ReplyDeleteAs a kid, one of the pleasures of reading comics was occasionally picking up non-favorite titles and finding myself enjoying them immensely. Space Ranger was one of those series that always struck me that way. Thoughts of completion, collection, and continuity were absent, while absorption in wild tales, whether they made sense or not, was the point of reading comics. Characters like Pow-Wow Smith, the Trigger Twins, Space Cabby, Roy Raymond, TV Detective and others occupied similar space in my thoughts.
ReplyDeleteBill Hickok:
Loved this series!
James Philippone:
ReplyDeleteThanks. I would love to see a collection of these stories. Even if was just on the DC site!
ReplyDeletePaul Zuckerman:
I can't say I ever warmed to Space Ranger, probably because I mostly only saw the later stories. I'll have to go back and read the Showcase stories written by Hamilton and some plotted by Fox--though I see one where John Forte was credited as the plotter. John Forte???? I thought he was just an artist.
Brown's art just didn't jump out at me and for some reason, Unexpected was one of the SF/adventure/mystery title that I bought least in the early 60s. Ironically, I probably bought more issues of Unexpected after Ranger jumped ship to Mystery in Space. But those books edited by Jack Schiff and his assistant editors Murray Boltinoff and George Kashdan just never really appealed to me. It was mostly in MIS where I read Ranger and I was annoyed that he had kicked Adam Strange to the back-up slot. Brown was gone by then from the strip, but the stories just didn't grab me.
I guess the main thing was that there was no or little human interest in the stories that I read. Gardner Fox put life into Adam Strange with his romance with Alanna. I never saw any of that in Space Ranger. And I hate those cute little alien sidekicks! Adam never had one! And did Myra actually have a last name back then, or was that an after-the-fact addition, like the case with Mark Merlin's or Roy Raymond's sidekicks?
Bob Doncaster:
ReplyDeleteNow I want a Zook and Cryll team-up with special guest star Plastic Man.
Johnny Williams:
ReplyDeleteDan, I liked Space Ranger. I didn’t like him as much as the aforementioned Adam Strange and I discovered Captain Comet ‘after’ those two in back issues (when I did all bets were off and it was obsession at first sight).
When I think back to what I liked about Rick the answers are not difficult to remember or understand. He was an ‘outer space hero’ and as everyone here knows by now, as a kid I was ‘Nuts’ about everything ‘Space’. So….
I also found his Accoutrements to be intriguing, starting with his half/helmet head gear which held a strong appeal and odd fascination for me. I had a thing for unusual variations on/of known things, in this case the ubiquitous transparent, globular space helmet of much popular fiction of the day.
Then there’s that universal beam ray gun of his. I was and still am a Huge fan of the trope known as the ‘Ray Gun’, lifelong. When Star Trek TOS premiered I became Immediately obsessed with phasers. That’s how bad it is. Lol. But I digress. The idea of a weapon capable of generating That Many different effects really appealed to me. I was used to blasters and heat rays and the like, but ice, disintegration, etc. Exciting stuff.
I had no problem with either Cryll or Zoom. Shapeshifting was one of my favorite powers and that’s why Reep was one of my first favorite Legionnaires.
In a boyhood awash in fantasy figures like ‘Scott McCloud-The Space Angel, and Commando Cody-Sky Marshal of The Universe’, liking a ‘Space Ranger’ seems almost inevitable.
Arthur Ziegler:
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid I was a big Space Ranger fan, and even molded a model of Cryll out of playdough. I remember my amazement when I saw Tales of the Unexpected #46 on the comic book stand with the Space Ranger inside a globe with a spiky alien! Later, I became more enamored with the more sophisticated art and stories of Adam Strange.
Mark Engblom:
ReplyDeleteThe Multi-Ray Gun seemed like the perfect weapon to appeal to kid sensibilities, since the toy guns we played with could often do anything we could imagine in the midst of heated faux-battles!
Richard Meyer:
ReplyDeleteI remember a scene in a bar filled with aliens where he was disguised as an old man and Cryll as a vulture type bird. The scene looked like a prototype for the Star Wars scene decades later. His stories had some great visuals.
Bob Bailey:
ReplyDeleteYes Dan! I loved the early Space Rangers! That first Showcase cover by was so exciting. Once he got to Tales of the Unexpected his early stories were a lot of fun. But yes he was not of the quality of Adam Strange or Captain Comet but he was still a feather in the cap of his creators: Edmond Hamilton, Gardner Fox and Bob Brown.
Bruce Mason:
ReplyDeleteRobots are designed by Lee Falk for Mandrake FB 52.
Brent Clark Rogers:
ReplyDeleteI have every appearance of Space Ranger. Awesome stuff.
Dean Kennedy:
ReplyDeleteI am not familiar with this, but it's good to be reminded that 50s sci-fi includes things other than movies.
Burns Duncan:
ReplyDeleteSpace Ranger, like Cave Carson, Rip Hunter, Mark Merlin, and the Sea Devils, was a DC hero generally ignored by fans of super-heroes. Even Adam Strange became accepted as a semi-super-hero by crossing over with the Justice League (and by his strip's having the same creative talents as the JSA revival characters).
Space Ranger's only representation in my collection is in a partial reprint of his origin story and in the couple of issues of Mystery in Space he shared with Adam Strange.
I am now curious of the sequence among
First appearance of Space Ranger
First appearance of Adam Strange
Each character getting a continuing series in an ongoing title.
One might have imagined the two characters sharing a title all along--except that Space Ranger was always apparently aimed at a less sophisticated readership.
I replied:
They were created in competition, I understand — one to be a futuristic spaceman hero and the other a contemporary spaceman hero.
Burns Duncan:
ReplyDeleteAnswering my own question!
Showcase had been promoted as a new title that would feature in each issue exciting concepts that might not merit continuing series. The first issue, for example, featured firefighters. The cover logo was simple, to allow display space for a secondary logo for the character/concept featured inside. Over the first two years, the most memorable issues starred Lois Lane and Flash, in pilots for new titles. By the third year, the focus shifted almost entirely to developing new series, with each getting multiple issues to get reliable sales numbers.
There were two consecutive issues of The Flash, leading to the character getting an ongoing title and the Atomic Age giving way completely to the Silver Age.
Then, there were two issues with future-era space hero from Jack Schiff, Space Ranger.
Then, there were three issues with contemporary space hero from Julius Schwartz, Adam Strange.
Note that around this time, the Brave and the Bold began its fifth year as a title with a new format, shifting from sword-and-sandal high adventure series to pilots for new series--appearing on the stands in alternating months from Showcase.
DC in its early decades had been a cautious publisher, always publishing comics in a variety of genres. Its monthly titles tended to be anthologies, whose content could be easily adjusted. A successful new character might get a berth in an anthology--or a title, but one that came out 6 or at most 8 times a year.
Strange Adventures had been around since 1951. Mystery in Space was started in 1956 as a companion title with similar contents and even the same logo design.
Although DC had never published gory comics, by the middle 1950s under the Comics Code, its surviving mystery titles were emphasizing weird l adventures. Tales of the Unexpected as a new title emphasized adventure elements from the getgo.
Here's what we know now.
Space Ranger was on the stands in Showcase, four months before Adam Strange.
I still don't know whether Space Ranger got his own strip before Adam Strange or at the same time.
We know that in the great editorial shifts of the middle 1960s, that had started with Julius Schwartz taking over Batman and Detective Comics, Julius Schwartz gave up The Flash and Mystery in Space, taking with him the creative talent and the character of Hawkman
DC finally had both its space heroes created in 1958 in the same title. However, editor Jack Schiff gave greater emphasis in Mystery in Space to Space Ranger. In the title's final year, the new strip Ultraa the Multi-Alien displaced both of them. Space Ranger outlasted Adam Strange but only by one issue.