Buck Rogers stuff

From Fancyclopedia 2, ca. 1959

What you are asked about when you mention stf to non-fans. "What, you read that crazy Buck Rogers stuff?" Crazy is not used in the bopster connotation. When Philip Nowlan wrote (in the August '28 and March '29 issues of Amazing) about the adventures of Anthony Rogers, an American World War I pilot transferred to the XXV Century (via a mine cave-in followed by suspended animation), neither he nor editor Gernsback dreamed of the frightful curse they were releasing on the stfnal world's public relations. Nowlan merely developed the idea that rocket guns (like the bazooka of 14 years later) and guerrilla tactics would be hard for an enemy to handle with nothing but atomic weapons and aircraft, a thought which has occurred to modern military theorists too. Unhappily Captain Rogers lost his original Christianame and acquired the better-known one in a comic strip which was both the eponym and epitome of all the thud-and-blunder stf that ever poured from hackish typers, which is why you're still likely to find people, sufficiently shocked, expressing their horror in the sentence quasi-quoted above.

Buck Rogers, scientifiction adventure hero, first appeared as Anthony Rogers in the novella Armageddon 2149 A.D. by Philip Francis Nowlan in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. John F. Dille, president of the National Newspaper Service syndicate, saw its potential and asked Nowlan to turn it into a comic strip, assigning staff artist Lt. Dick Calkins to to draw the strip.

The comic appeared in daily U.S. newspapers on January 7, 1929, and then in books and media adaptations including radio in 1932, movies, a television series, toys and other formats.

From Fancyclopedia 2 Supplement, ca. 1960

Buck Rogers Though theoretically the comic strip was a sort of continuation of the original prozine stories, Damon Knight recalls a "curious fact, which I'd never seen mentioned anywhere, that Nowlan/Calkins' Killer Kane looked exactly like Bold's drawings of Blackie DuQuesne [in E. E. Smith's The Skylark of Space] and although the first few strips were based roughly on the Nowlan story, next thing you know (or anyhow, next thing I remember) Kane has kidnapped the heroine in a spherical spaceship and the hero is in hot pursuit.

• Buck Rogers Comic Strips and Short Stories at the Internet Archive.

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Fiction

1928—

This is a fiction page, describing fictional ideas and characters