Number 1206: Captain Science and the Flower of Death!

I showed “The Flower of Death,” a few years ago. I’m re-presenting it with new scans. What I said about it then was that it was a story I chased for years without knowing what it was. I’d seen it when I was very young, maybe six-years-old, at a friend’s house. Despite being surrounded by two very cool Wood and Orlando Captain Science stories, what I remembered about the comic book was the transition of flower to ape. People write me sometimes and ask if I can help them identify a story they remember, and without fail I can't. I can't even help myself. This was a story stuck in my memory for many years that I couldn't find, and then one day opened up Captain Science #5 and there it was. Eureka!

Except...it's not much of a story. Artwork is serviceable, credited by the Grand Comics Database in their question mark fashion as being by Bill Fraccio? and Vince Napoli? So they're not sure. I wondered about the clumsy transition panels (which look like photostats), flower to ape and ape to flower, and then I found the origin of it in a gasoline ad from a 1950 issue of Life. This is another of my discoveries in Life that later turned up in comic books.

I've also included a Captain Science story from the issue because I love this Joe Orlando-Wally Wood science fiction and so do you. These are my scans from the original comic, but the story is also included in the book Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction, edited by J. David Spurlock. It's a trade paperback available from Amazon.com, among other bookselling sites, and if you're fortunate, at your favorite local comic book shop.

From Captain Science #5, 1951:

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Number 1126


Superduper-Gookum!


I've heard the first couple of issues of Mad didn't exactly set the comic book buying world on fire. It took a couple more issues for that to happen, and eventually the comic book was selling a million copies an issue. "Blob" from issue #1, and "Gookum" from #2, both by Wood, didn't get the attention of his later strips, like "Superduperman."

To show some of the difference in the respect "Gookum" got as opposed to "Superduperman," in issue #4 (where Mad sales were said to have taken off), Heritage Auctions sold the six pages of original art for "Gookum" in 2002 for $10,925, but in 2009 the splash page only of "Superduperman" went for $43,318.75.

Above is the scan of the original art for the "Superduperman" splash page, and below the whole six-page "Gookum" for you to look at and admire. There's nothing wrong with "Gookum." The earliest issues of Mad were supposedly take-offs on the EC line, so Wood did science fiction stories and Davis did horror spoofs. It was when Mad started spoofing other comic books and television that readers found them.

I was too young to buy those issues of Mad from the stands, but my brother-in-law, Jim, was a high school kid at the time and said Mad was IT, the coolest comic ever. Even in the early '50s comic books were considered kid stuff, beneath the hep kats in high school, except for Mad.

I'm also showing the color version of "Gookum," which I scanned from the Tales Calculated To Drive You Mad Special #1, published in 1997.

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While we're on the subject of EC Comics, I came across this interesting reference to the infamous "Are You A Red Dupe?" ad that ran in EC's titles in mid-1954.

This letter, by T. Bernard Mathews of Reading, PA, was published in the Reading Eagle of May 19, 1954. What Mathews has done is quote directly from the "Red Dupe" ad. (He even perpetuated the misspelling of Wertham's name: it's not "Frederick," but Fredric). "After little reading," he claims early on in his letter. Yes, very little! One page, one ad out of a comic book. That's Bernard's research! I'm not saying the information in the EC page is incorrect, although it does seem a bit odd that they blunted their message with a Mad, or more correctly Panic (i.e., the comic poor Melvin printed is Panisky), satire of Russian censorship.

The ad got publisher William M. Gaines in even more trouble with the Senate committee he testified before. People in that era didn't have a sense of humor about being called red dupes.

I found the letter on the blog, Yesterday's Papers, an amazing site by John Adcock. I recommend it highly.

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Number 1100


One thousand Pappy posts ago


In Pappy's #100, posted on February 27, 2007, I showed one of the printings of this story, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I scanned the Strange Suspense Stories version published by Charlton in '54, which was actually the third printing (by the third publisher) of the same strip in five years. Read my original comments at Pappy's #100 to see the unusual publishing history of this story.

The version here comes from Startling Terror Tales #10 in 1952. If you don't want to ruin your eyesight on my crappy 2007 scans, you can see much better scans of the Strange Suspense Stories version at The Horrors Of It All for part 1, and here for part 2.

"Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is drawn by Wally Wood, and I believe it's inked by Wood collaborator Harry Harrison, who once bragged about how fast he could ink a page. This does have a hurried quality to it, but that could be because it was drawn originally for publisher Victor Fox, who was notorious for being late on payments, if he paid at all. Maybe Wood and Harrison didn't want to give it the full treatment because of that. The first few pages have more detail than the last pages, for instance. But despite that it has come down to us as a really interesting and vintage horror comics version of the classic tale by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The cover is by L. B. Cole.

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