A disguised Space Ranger menaced by a huge red cat-bear thing in Tales of the Unexpected 68?
Okay, fine.
A guy with a solar orb for a head melting and burning everything around him in My Greatest Adventure 52?
Even better. Made sense that the guy seemed wearing only his briefs, because having a sun for a head must be a sweaty business.
But the most tantalizing cover in that 1961 ad was for Strange Adventures 124, which spotlighted a giant, orange, blank-faced alien who was firing lightning beams at state cops.
I had to know what that was about — but wouldn’t for several years. Such were the vagaries of newsstand distribution in those days.
I’d learn later that his “Face Hunter” wasn’t just from Saturn, but from Klaramar, a sub-atomic world within an atom on Saturn that operates within a different temporal field than Earth.
The first Faceless Creature was Klee-Pan, a benevolent alien who seems to steal the faces from terrestrial monuments. In fact, he is seeking a bomb that will destroy the solar system, one that has been locked by the evil Chen Yull into a vault that can only be opened by some giant head.
Visiting Mount Rushmore (where else?), Klee-Pan teamed up with two South Dakota highway patrolmen, Jim Boone and Bob Colby, to save our worlds. As a reward, Klee-Pan enabled the two police officers to telepathically communicate with each other. The pair would come back in Strange Adventures 142 (July 1962) to battle Chen Yull himself, and then Chen Yull would return to threaten humanity again in Strange Adventures 153 (June 1963).
Mike Sekowsky, Carmine Infantino and Gil Kane did the artistic honors for the Gardner Fox stories.
Come to think of it, as a kid I had a particular affinity for giants, for things colored orange and for blank-faced characters (the Human Torch and Negative Man were favorites). No wonder the Faceless Hunter from Saturn was a shoo-in.
No comments:
Post a Comment