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.
