February 1963: The Alien Invasion on the 18th Hole

Having always had somewhat less than no interest in spectator sports, I shouldn’t have been expected to embrace a 1963 comic book called Strange Sports Stories.

That I had any interest in it at all was entirely due to the talents of writers Gardner Fox and John Broome, artist Carmine Infantino and editor Julius Schwartz, who had refined the optimistic, sunlit, linear-landscaped science fiction stories they created for Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space into a distinctly odd sub-genre.

Where else might you find intangible prizefighters, invisible baseball teams or rocket-sledding golfers who had to overcome alien spaceships instead of water hazards?

But the concept never progressed beyond five tryout issues in The Brave and the Bold, so general interest in it was apparently as tepid as my own.

Presumably kids who wanted to play baseball were out doing it, while those who wanted to read comics were sprawled on the living room carpet doing that.

Strange Sports Stories explicitly tried to bridge that gap by providing more than one story (Goliath of the Gridiron, The Hot-Shot Hoopsters) about young intellectuals who become literally fantastic athletes. In Hoopsters  (The Brave and the Bold 46, February-March 1963), undersized kids aged 12 to 14 — certainly part of the target audience for this title — use their scientific knowledge to outperform top college basketball players.

But after all, why be a mere star athlete when, with the same mental leap, you might be a superhero? That left Strange Sports Stories falling short, an idea whose time never came.