January 1961: You Had Me at ‘Orange’

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.

November 1960: Dragons and Dinosaurs

In We Fought the Earth’s Last Dragon (My Greatest Adventure 49, Nov. 1960), a locked trunk purchased at a Connecticut auction sends two treasure-hunting Yankees to Oregon’s Saddle Mountain — and a confrontation with a dragon.

One is greedy, the other responsible and altruistic, and they have to learn to work together to use the contents of a sorcerer’s strongbox to stop the menace they’ve unwittingly unleashed. Nick Cardy provides the art.

Meanwhile, over in Mystery in Space 63, Adam Strange is busy being turned into a gas and vacuumed up — very much the kind of peril that would plague the Flash, also drawn by Carmine Infantino.

Strange Adventures 121, my favorite issue of that title, featured stories by Gardner Fox — The Wand That Could Work Miracles, a “Space Museum” tale called The Billion-Year Old Spaceship and Invasion of the Flying Reptiles. All offered science fictional wish fulfillment.

A hole opens in time, releasing invulnerable pteranodans from a hundred million years ago over Washington, DC.

Yikes.

Luckily, a plucky husband-and-wife team of scuba-diving scientists, Jim and Rhoda Trent, have found a plesiosaur frozen in ice (Schwartz’s titles were always resolutely feminist, their female characters smart, stylish, cool-headed and brave).

Befriending the revived dinosaur, whom they nickname Ol’ Pleasure, the Trents — by offering themselves as bait on water skis — are able to use the plesiosaur to defeat the pteranondans.

My favorite part was the last panel, with the Trents happily tossing fish to their plesiosaur pal at a seaquarium. 

The story was probably popular, because the Trents returned to help giant undersea frog people in Strange Adventures 130 (July 1961). And the cover idea — flying dinosaurs coming through a hole in the sky — was recycled for Green Lantern 30, cover-dated July 1964. 

January 1960: Big Purple Beasts and the Borg

I wonder if the purple simian-ish creature in I Was a Bodyguard to a Beast (My Greatest Adventure 39) counted toward DC’s monthly maximum quota on gorilla covers?

I’m guessing not.

Meanwhile, in the Space Ranger story in Tales of the Unexpected 45, artist Jim Mooney shows us a criminal’s “army of specially trained interplanetary beasts” that might have made appropriate foes for the Legion of Super-Pets a couple of years later.

Come to think of it, Space Ranger’s Cryll and Chameleon Boy’s Proty were a lot alike. Cryll and the Martian Manhunter’s Zook might have fit right in with the Legion of Super Pets.

Such are the kinds of thoughts that jolt me awake at night.

Strange Adventures 112 includes a Gardner Fox/Mike Sekowsky cover story and a Space Museum story, Revolt of the Spaceships!

“The Space Museum tales center on a 25th Century museum filled with objects commemorating heroic deeds leading to the conquest of space,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost. “Each tale would involve a visit by Howard Parker and his young son Tommy Parker. Howard would tell Tommy the story behind one of the objects in the museum.

“The Space Museum tales sometimes contained science fiction mysteries; near the end of each tale, Howard would pause, and urge Tommy to find a clue that would solve the mystery. The effect is similar to Ellery Queen’s Challenge to the Reader.”

The issue also includes a John Broome/Sid Greene story intended to underline editor’s Julius Schwartz’s running theme about celebrating the intellect. 

In Tomorrow’s Hero, mutant Ral Grayson has the ability to understand things instantly by just seeing a portion of the process, a power he employs to stop an alien invasion.

The invaders’ name? The Borg.