Speaking of riffing on ideas, Marvel Tales #107 (February 1952) has a tale called “Going My Way?” wherein a spooky ghost utters the phrase repeatedly to the driver of a car, who comes to realize he has died and this is an angel of death. The famous Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker” also used this […]
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Wow, my 500th entry! It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing this for almost two years! I’m happy to see that I’m well into what I am calling the “Early Silver Age”, where many of the horror and science fictions stories are interesting, even if superheroes themselves have faded down to just a few exceptions. […]
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In DC’s Strange Adventures #19 (February 1952), the Captain Comet story features a galaxy-wandering crew of 12 mortal heroes from Earth’s past: Zus, Merkry, Hurkles, Demeter, Dionsius and more. Zus has the idea to create a spaceship that will let them wander the galaxy searching for the secrets of immortality. Every fifty years, one of […]
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In Action Comics #167 (February 1952), the Tommy Tomorrow feature has a story called “The Man Who Stopped Space Flight”: an eccentric “Earth isolationist” scientist develops a mechanism to halt all space flight in the solar system. Tommy foils the plan and teaches the scientist the error of his ways by pointing out all the […]
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The parade of robots keeps on coming, with Batman #70 (February 1952) featuring a robot that functions as a cop and tempts Commissioner Gordon into replacing Batman and Robin. While Robot-Man has been around since 1942, he was actually a cyborg (a human brain in a robot body), much like the 1980’s Robocop, yet the […]
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In EC’s Weird Fantasy #12 (January 1952), “A Man’s Job” features an amusing tale from a future in which women and men’s roles are reversed: a woman president, a mostly-women Supreme Court, all women going out to work while the men stay at home and take care of the house. Truly a weird fantasy! I […]
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It wasn’t just Superman who was experimenting with life-like robots, it appears that Luthor was also doing so in Action Comics #166 (January 1952). Luthor kidnaps Perry White and switches in his robot duplicate to send Lois to dangerous assignments to keep Superman busy. Robots seem to be popping up in every comic book by […]
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Throughout the 1950s, Superman and Superboy often used a series of realistic robots to deceive Lois/Lana or others about Clark’s real identity. Action Comics #165 (December 1951) could be considered the first such use of this literary device. In it, Superman meets “Krag” a superman from the planet Mercury who joins up with criminals. Turns […]
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In Batman #69 (November 1951), the villain “King of the Cats” is introduced. At this point in DC continuity, Catwoman has been rehabilitated for about a year now and Selina Kyle is mostly just a pet shop owner. The King of the Cats initiates a crime spree involving cat-themed crimes and Batman worries that Selina […]
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EC Comics continue to push the envelope of shocking imagery in its latest comic, Shock SuspenStories #1 (November 1951). While “The Neat Job!” is somewhat infamous (having been featured in the 1973 anthology film) and has its own particular grotesque imagery (a neat freak tortures his wife until she snaps and arranges his body parts […]
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