Space Crazy Comics: The Man Who Stole the Moon

Some of these stories are a little less worthy of talking about than others... at least, they are until one gets a little creative imagining real explanations for them.

This story from Outer Space #25 is rather dull in most respects, but has an event that is intended to surprise the reader:

Note that, while the events of this panel-the Moon being shrunken down to hand-held size and being displayed by a man who proudly proclaimed his purloinment of it before a club-actually occurred in the main body of the story (this is an introductory splash panel from the first page), the true chronicle of events within the story are quite different from how the self-alleged thief presented them.

(The club, by the way, is an adventuring and rare oddities club. The Moon-thief also apparently poached the last surviving unicorn, if his fellow club members are to be believed. No joke.)

No, instead, a couple of aliens show up and take him into their saucer. While there have been a lot of aliens that were pretty crazy described by people who believed they were real, these guys are human aliens who probably aren't entirely right in the head.

Why do I say this?

Because they reportedly don't like to "startle" Earth people, but then they pull this stunt.

My conclusion: These jerks who shrank the Moon (and admittedly later restored it) were drunk off their butts.

"Oh, those guys on the planet, they won't care (hic!) that the big shiny thing in the sky will vanish for two weeks! That won't startle 'em! Hee hee!"

So remember, kids-never drink and abduct.

-Signing off.

Just Plain Crazy Comics: (Nightmare and Sleepy) And The Corpse That Steals Living Men's Faces!

Been a bit since I've done one of these. Keep a hand on your face, just in case this happens.

Anyway, this story is from Clue Comics #3, and is (obviously) part of the incredibly absurd Nightmare and Sleepy feature.

We start with some guys who just watched a hearse drive past. One of their number happens to be an undertaker, and makes a suggestion.

What a great idea! Let's all make a bet where we collect our winnings over each other's dead bodies! That will surely reinforce our friendship!

This panel brings up a question that I'm curious about:

Is it actually legal to work a bet into your will? That seems strange, at the least.

Anyway, the bet soon has a result. Just a few days later...

The undertaker died first.

OR DID HE DUN DUN DUN?!!

At the funeral, the others are wondering if they'll be able to collect from the dead man.

Funerals are guaranteed to bring out the best in people, apparently.

And now we randomly check on our heroes, Nightmare and Sleepy:

Wait, what? What? You guys are basically hobos who occasionally get paid for wrestling in local matches when you get places. How the heck do you know about this bet, exactly?

Never mind.

Anyway, they see someone climbing up the side of a house.

Naturally, this arouses their natural alertness and suspicions, so their clothes "fly to the winds" (the story's words, not mine) and go running.

They corner the mysterious individual against the wall. (Wait, did that sentence make sense? I'm not sure.)

It has no face? Why...

IT TOOK HIS FACE!

... Sorry.

Anyway, long story short, the mysterious figure hits them a few more times and runs away.

Meanwhile, the guy in that house finds a note from the undertaker at his window that the figure was trying to get in. (Yes, really. Although the story doesn't make that terribly clear, by which I mean I only figured it out while closely examining the panels in preparation for this blog post. I've read it probably half a dozen times before.)

The note tells him where to collect, so he goes there.

And then he dies.

The story gets very repetitive and weird at this point (and it was pretty bad already), so I'll cut to the chase.

Nightmare finally has another fight with the dude, punches him in the face, and his mask shatters... because it was a mirror. (Seriously, that's the explanation for the stolen faces schtick?)

And surprise, surprise, it turns out that it was the undertaker.

So, let me get this straight: The undertaker was of reasonably sound body (other than the obvious), and an older gentlemen, but he was also mere hours from death. And he gave Nightmare, who is, need I remind you, a guy who makes money wrestling for a living (and is darned good at it, for that matter) a really hard fight?

Was this one of those crazy diseases that gives you superhuman powers while you're dying, or what?

I'm having trouble figuring out if this was really a weirder story than the Upside-Down Town one or not.

(Previous posts that mention Nightmare and Sleepy: Golden Age Moment of the Day #22, "Checking the Checker," "The Upside-Down Town."

-Signing off.

Space Crazy Comics: For Amusement Only

"For Amusement Only" is a Ditko-drawn story from Outer Space #18. And it's a doozy.

We start with a guy that only Ditko could have drawn, a big-wig botanist, making an observation about plant growth.

His observation that it's been growing quickly suddenly takes an absurd turn...

Putting his expertise, not to mention the narration, further into question is the fact that news of this sudden change is swiftly brought into the office by somebody else.

And the plants do exhibit fantastic growth.

Things swiftly start to look rather like this story, but worse, since they don't have atomic spaceships and whatnot.

Not to mention that the option taken by the parties in that other story aren't even working here.

They can't even kill them with fire.

World leaders are forced to coordinate large-scale evacuation efforts, but traditionally vegetation-light areas are also succumbing.

Even mountain ranges offer no refuge; only one landmass and the oceans offer places to stay. (Never mind that the oceans have plant life too.)

Things are looking very bad. Then, suddenly...

Wait, what? What?

All of these problems have been caused... by a possibly teenaged girl/woman? (On the greatest planet in the universe!!)

Things go more or less back to normal, and...

I really don't know what else to say about this story, other than the fact that the reason behind all of it is really inventive, amusing, and absolutely terrifying, by the standards of its genre and time.

-Signing off.

Just Plain Crazy Comics: The Half Men

Don't have too much time for this one, but here we go.

"The Half Men" is a story from Mysteries of Unknown Worlds #8.

It features a "crippled," sickly guy (it isn't clear exactly what was wrong with him, but he apparently was racked by constant pain), a blind man who lost his wife, and a man who lost his family in some sort of accident embarking on a journey in a fantastic submersible mole machine in an effort to find oil on the sea floor.

The reason they take the machine down on the dangerous voyage despite being its joint inventors is because each feels that he has absolutely nothing to lose.

They don't find oil, but eventually find their way to the center of the Earth (naturally). There, they are greeted by a crowd of mysterious people who claim to be mutant sorcerers (quite literally "a mutant race that men called sorcerers"), who seem to heal the cripple and the blind man and bring back their various lost loved ones.

Here's the main point of the story that makes me remember it and makes it creepy: The last of the men to be convinced to join the sorcerers, before being convinced, looks at the crippled man and the blind man and tells them that they're crazy, because they're clearly still affected by their conditions. Then the head sorcerer puts a hand on him, and he suddenly can see the differences, and can also see his lost loved ones.

That suggests to me that it's some kind of elaborate deception, either to keep them from returning to the surface, or simply to make them happy. Either way, it's rather creepy.

-Signing off.

Space Crazy Comics: The Ganymede Enigma

This story, from Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #16, starts off quite dully.

It's so dull, in fact, that I'm starting with an image from the second page. Don't worry, the first page was so boring that nothing of importance or significance happened on it.

Some guy has taken a rocket out to the vicinity of Jupiter in hopes of investigating it. Since he can't land on the gas giant, he'll land on Ganymede.

He lands, tests the atmosphere, and if this story wasn't failing some field or another forever, he would have died instantly.

He takes a look around, and...

Don't worry, it gets better... sort of.

He sees some togas on a clothesline, and decides it's time for a disguise.

He's wandering around when...

Not so much hideous as incredibly dorky beings approach.

They find him... curiously exciting.

He decides to escape, seeing as how the beings who have captured him are huge, have incredibly short legs, and probably could be outpaced by a toddler. One of the workers grabs him, and he punches the man out, only to discover...

... This guy must read Arthur C. Clarke or something.

Who built the robots? A good question indeed. But he jumps to yet another conclusion:

Uh, dude?

You explored like two miles of the planet's surface. How do you know that there wasn't a real settlement of less humanlike people over the next ridge? Or that perhaps the big robots were actually life support suits or transportation? Or that they were actually invaders from another solar system?

Just because they're on Jupiter's moon doesn't mean they have a blooming thing to do with Jupiter.

My favorite part of this story has to be the weird can robot/creatures; otherwise, it's kind of forgettable.

-Signing off.

Space Crazy Comics: The Machine Men of Mars

This story, from Outer Space #24 (blah blah Golden Age Comics blah blah public domain blah blah), features some interesting designs and a story with a somewhat surprising ending.

A rocket journeying around near Mars is suffering from difficulties.

Generally speaking, unless you need extra materials, if you've got spacesuits you can effect repairs in space pretty easily most of the time... A bit dangerous, perhaps (you don't want to get hit by a micrometeoroid), but less wasteful of fuel and time than landing on a planet or moon and then taking off again.

So naturally, they land on one of Mars' moons.

On the approach, they make a discovery reminiscent of the strange discovery from this tale-the surface is covered in something.

Instead of slab creatures, it's buildings.

Unlike the other story, they happily land on the obstructions.

They make a most peculiar observation:

Somebody built the buildings? SHOCKING.

They see a bunch of robots running around on the ground, and take off right before the robots come up onto the roof to catch them.

Then, they decide to do something really crazy-land on Mars.

So let me get this straight: A bunch of robots tried to catch you on Deimos, and you think they might be from Mars, so you're going to Mars to investigate?

Huh. Does this make you think what it makes me think?

I have to admit, sometimes the breathless narration in this story amuses me.

Especially right here.

Those look like regular speech bubbles to me, pal.

We learn the tragic story of Mars, and then disaster strikes.

There must be some Laws of Stupid Robotics out there somewhere, don't you think? (The Laws of Stupid Robotics would be equivalent to Asimov's Laws, but designed by a bunch of simpering morons from a story like this one.)

Anyway, there was so much stuff on the last page, I just shrugged and decided I'd stick up the whole thing in one piece. (It saved me from an extra picture upload, too.)

The captain decides that, in order to keep the robots from having a chance to invade Earth, he and his crew must make the ultimate sacrifice and tells the Earth fleet to take out the building that the master robot is keeping them in, because the master robot is in it too.

This story is interesting if for no other reason than the fact that it kills off all the protagonists in a simple, pure act of heroism. It's very different from a lot of these stories, anyway.

-Signing off.

Space Crazy Comics: Unwanted World (in 30 Seconds)

From Outer Space #24 (public domain junk), Unwanted World is a story about some rather jerky and self-important Atlanteans.

They're being attacked by machine-gun and warplane-wielding Native Americans and similarly armed Viking-like barbarians from North America and Europe... (I'd have shown those panels, because yeah, but I'm quite low on time.)

So what's Xelox's solution?

He blew it up.

Of course, I'm placing this panel out of context-he had everybody evacuated into the flying saucer first, and then blew it up.

They lived on the Moon, whose original inhabitable environment they just might have accidentally destroyed, until they were discovered by space explorers orbiting the Moon.

And then, if the inhabitants of modern Earth didn't conform to their standards, they promised to "infect" (their words) them with the "newly invented cure to greed." Yes. Seriously.

Creepy, weird, and evil, guys. Cut it out.

-Signing off.

Space Crazy Comics: Fluke!

This story, from Mysteries of Unexplored Worlds #9, is not about a whale's tail. Neither is it about a parasite, a fish, or anything else mentioned on this disambiguation page.

It is also not about the various things you're likely to see in a Google search.

But that's neither here nor there. Let's get going.

The story opens with the launch of a huge satellite, the Titania, purportedly the biggest satellite ever put into orbit.

The satellite is separated from its rocket in this rather amusing image.

The images Titania sends back are also rather comical-look closely at this panel for a rather dated (at best) rendering of the Earth's surface.

Then, something alarming happens.

(Reminder: Meteors are the flashes made by objects falling through the Earth's atmosphere.) It seems that the satellite is in trouble, until...

Instead of destroying Titania, the meteoroids cling to it, creating an ever-growing object in orbit.

(Reminder: Meteorites are the debris left on the surface by objects that have fallen through the Earth's atmosphere from space.) While nobody is sure what will happen next, the head scientist decides that action must be taken.

Note the statement is somewhat ambiguous-is he saying "We can't wait to see what Titania will do next?" or "We can't wait to see that H-bomb blow some (expletive deleted) up!!"?

Sadly, I messed up the next image a bit, but we can still see what's going on:

I find it hilarious that the crazy space rocks are still flaming (of course, they shouldn't really have been flaming in the first place...).

They're still working on the missile.

Unfortunately, the missle missile misses, due to a misscalculation.

Fortunately, there is a deus ex machina, though sadly it makes no sense.

It moves out to a vaguely more Moonlike orbit.

I just have to ask, where the heck did all the space rocks come from, anyway? It's hecka weird.

But there's one last moment in the story: The titular fluke. (What, a satellite going all Borg and assimilating everything in Earth's orbit wasn't enough of one for ya?)

Yes, they really just did that.

It's kind of an interesting story for historical reasons if nothing else.

I mean, doesn't this sound like the kind of story that would be spawned as a direct response to the way people felt about Sputnik launching? It does to me.

-Signing off.