Number 1195: Forty-three years ago today...

On July 20, 1969 Mrs. Pappy and I, younger and with much more energy, were moving into a new apartment. We stopped, set up our 20" black and white television, and watched the historic moon landing. I don't recall much more moving being done that day, just us sitting in front of the tube watching ghostly images from a quarter million miles away.

Race For the Moon #2 (1958) is a comic I have shown before, but these are new scans. Kirby penciled the whole book. Inks are by Marvin Stein for “The Thing On Sputnik 4” and inks for the other stories and cover are by Al Williamson.

Forty-three years ago today I figured by the 21st century we'd have a permanent base on the moon and have gone to Mars and back several times. What I didn't realize then was how much all of it cost, and how the visions of a Jack Kirby didn't impact decisions by politicians and engineers. So there are the real things like sending astronauts to the moon to pick up rocks, and then there are the Jack Kirby things that seem so much more interesting.

There was a real race to get to the moon between the U.S. and Soviet Union. It was in our minds that we might be sharing it with our ideological Cold War enemies, the Russians.

The fictional response to a U.S./Soviet Union race shows in this '50s cover of Saturn Science Fiction from Cracked publisher, Robert Sproul, and also from the story “Lunar Trap,” in RFTM which treats the Russians as enemies, but in a surprising turn for comics, also people we could reach on a human level.