| Panel strips or pages, the ill-called "funny papers", which use fantastic material. In addition to comics regularly fantastic there have been many dabblers, and scientificomics have appeared thru the mediums of reprint comic magazines, original comic magazines, Big Little Books, magazines like Out Of This World Adventures, fanzines, toys, children's clubs, etc. Fen on the whole dislike the comics for the same reason they dislike floods of new and inferior proz, and the dutiful collector now is rare.
The 100% fantastics include such as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, Superman, Mandrake, Alley Oop and other long-established strips; plus short-lived ones like Rick Kane Space Marshal, Beyond Mars (with continuity by Jack Williamson, who should be ashamed of himself), Space Cadet (a picturization of the TV series), and in England "Jeff Hawke, Space Rider". Fandom has gotten into the comics too; in 1954 Strange Adventures, a comic book, came out with a tale of light-signals between Earth and Saturn at the "N2F" convention in San Francisco, Saturnians having contacted us as most likely to believe in them. Shudder and pass on.
|
