February 1963: Cryll, the Alien Wonder

When the situation looked particularly dire, DC’s “spaceman/Batman,” Space Ranger, had two deus ex machina he could always rely on. 

They were roughly analogous to a utility belt and a Boy Wonder.

One was his ray gun, a device that the term “versatile” doesn’t do justice, firing a Thermoblaze ray, a Vacuumizer, Numb Rings, a Sonifier, Asborb-Discs, etc. It proved as handy as Space Ghost’s later power bands.

And when that failed him, Space Ranger could always count on being bailed out by his little pink sidekick, the rotund, trunk-snouted alien Cryll.

“Cryll, who could transform himself into any animal (like the Doom Patrol's Beast Boy, but with the added advantage of being able to use alien fauna with exotic abilities), was a valuable ally,” noted comics historian Don Markstein.

In Cryll's Deadly Double! (Tales of the Unexpected 75, Feb.-March 1963), artist Bob Brown and writer Arnold Drake finally gave readers an origin for Cryll while introducing us to his evil opposite number, Drexyll.

We learned that a teleportation experiment gone wrong had propelled Cryll into space, and that the criminal Drexyll had later managed to duplicate it to escape capture.

After defeating Drexyll in a Sword in the Stone-type battle of transformations and dispatching him home, Cryll says, “It's fortunate that the teleportation process can only be used for brief periods each year! I couldn’t stand another battle like that! I’m pooped!”

“Easygoing, good for a laugh, and looking for all the world like one of those squeezable stress dolls, Cryll was Space Ranger’s loyal companion from their first published adventure,” noted Jon Morris in his book The League of Regrettable Sidekicks. 

“ ‘It was certainly my lucky day when you found me, stranded far out in the deeps of space beyond Pluto,’ Cryll recalls in a flashback, and the reader is treated to the sight of Space Ranger carrying in both hands what appears to be a ham frozen in a block of ice.”

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: The Riddle of the Rival Spacemen

Even when I was 6 years old, in 1960, I was clear on the fact that Space Ranger was only the second-best spaceman in the DC universe.

Over in Mystery in Space, Adam Strange had the advantage of stories by Gardner Fox and art by Carmine Infantino (who could not only make you believe the unbelievable, but make you believe the unbelievable to be sleek, tempered and elegant).

Space Ranger, the lead feature in Tales of the Unexpected, was delivered with the workmanlike art of Bob Brown and goofy-fun stories by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney.

DC’s two spaceman superheroes — one operating in the present, the other in the future — were actually created to be rival concepts and placed with rival editorial teams.

This house ad spotlights Tales of the Unexpected 55. In The Ghost Creatures of Phobos, Allied Solar Enterprises exec Rick Starr dons his Space Ranger disguise and, with his cute shape-shifting little pal Cryll, investigates reports of ghostly menaces on the Martian moon Phobos. The phantoms of monsters and Wellsian war machines turn out to be images reflected from the moon’s past for criminal purposes.

In Mystery in Space 63’s The Weapon That Swallowed Men, the green, cube-headed alien Vantor invade Rann with a weapon that turns people into gas.

“Carmine Infantino’s art is beautiful in this tale,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “An early scene shows ruins of Sumuru, the first city on Rann. The walls of the ruins are made up of numerous irregularly sized rectangular blocks... They form an imaginative and unusual variation on Infantino's Art Deco architecture.”

And in House of Mystery 104’s The Seeing-Eye Man, a scientist’s “retriever ray” pulls an alien spaceship to a crash landing on Earth. He’s pressed into service leading the temporarily blinded, telepathic alien Zod, and cleverly thwarts the alien’s plan to conquer Earth.

April 1960: Moon Monsters and Jewel Men

To me, the appeal of DC’s science fiction titles ran a close second to my true love, the superheroes.

Here we have titles that were on the newsstands during January and February 1960 — Strange Adventures 114, House of Mystery 97 and Tales of the Unexpected 47, starring its own superhero, Space Ranger (many readers generally seemed to prefer Adam Strange, over in Mystery in Space).

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.