BHOC: SPACE MAN #10

On that same trip that I talked my grandparents into taking to the distant Sun-Vet Mall so that I could go to Ed’s Coins and Stamps, one of the very few shops that I knew of in my area that sold back issue comic books, my younger brother Ken also bought a copy of this issue of SPACE MAN. I have no idea why he landed on this book–probably, the painted cover simply appealed to him. He was perhaps just a bit more space-oriented at that moment than I was, having fallen under the spell of STAR WARS and its assorted knock-offs such as BATTLESTAR: GALACTICA. Whatever drew him to it, he took the book home with us–and in a few years it wound up being absorbed into my collection.

To be honest, I’ve never been a big fan of the output of DELL COMICS. I’m aware that there’s a bunch of very good material among the titles they published, but they somehow never appealed to me as a kid. That’s probably mostly down to the fact that DELL never really did super hero comics, and super heroes were what I was most interested in as a reader. DELL mostly specialized in licensed properties from animation, television and film, which made them the number one publisher of comic books in the United States for most of the 1950s. A split between the DELL ownership and Western Publishing, who had been producing the content for their comic book line and who controlled the rights to many of the firm’s most lucrative properties, in the early 1960s led to a split between the two, which resulted in the similar-but-competing GOLD KEY COMICS line being launched. That together with a decision to increase their cover price to 15 cents rather than the 12 cents that became industry standard cost them a good chunk of their business.

Additionally, I simply didn’t like the look for a lot of DELL comics. Their storytelling was absolutely clear but also absolutely rigid, confined in a tight six-panel grid much of the time. Exaggeration and dramatics weren’t what DELL was interested in, clarity was the whole ball game for them. And while their comics were clear, they also struck me as bloodless and even a little bit boring much of the time. They’d also play around with having borderless panels, which struck my kid sensibilities as being wrong somehow. and I never entirely warmed to their use of painted covers, as nice as many of them were. Finally, even for films or shows that I might have an interest in, the DELL stories struck me as being surplus to requirement. They were often just a hair off-the-mark for what made the shows in question work for me, and they could never quite capture the essential essence of the performers they were cartooning.

By the early 1970s, much of DELL’s output had been turned over to reprints of stories that they’d commissioned in earlier times. So it turns out that SPACE MAN #10 is an almost exact replica of SPACE MAN #2, which was released almost a decade earlier in 1962. The script for it was written by Ken Fitch and it was illustrated by Jack Sparling, an artist whose work I was somewhat familiar with from his assorted DC assignments. Sparling was a guy whose arrival on DC series seemed to spell their end, and he rode more than one title to cancellation in the late 1960s in this manner. His work was always a bit rough and sketchy, with a shocking use of spotted blacks that was coming from the Milton Caniff school. So I didn’t really find his work appealing as a kid, though I see a lot more value in it today.

SPACE MAN concerned the adventures of pilot Major Ian Stannard of the United States, described as a “rocket ship ace.” It was pretty straightforward space opera of the era, with a strong bit of pro-American patriotic jingoism to it. Among Ian’s friends were his sidekick fourteen-year-old Johnny Mack, his fiancée Mary Lansing and his boss Colonel Hooper. They’re at odds with the Great Revolutionary Free People’s Republic, who are godless Asian caricature space communists. They’ve thrown in their lot with Garrak-Axos and his alien forces from Alpha Centauri who wish to conquer the Earth. But our brave space men are up there fighting for truth and virtue and apple pie and Chevrolet, and they won’t let the bad guy aliens win! The whole endeavor feels like a throwback to an earlier time, like a Golden Age story even though it was produced more recently than that.

So there are the usual space battles and flag-waving, exploration and discovery, double-crosses and daring do. But somehow, it’s all been drained of any excitement. Everything is straightforward and clear, but totally unexciting. It feels almost like a textbook somehow. It was also written for a younger and less sophisticated readership that even I was by 1978. As such, I didn’t find a whole lot to love here. I was fascinated by the fact that the story had originally been released in early 1962, right at the point when Marvel was just starting to introduce its super hero line. It was simple to compare even just the first issue of FANTASTIC FOUR to this comic and see just how much better and more exciting it was.

DELL’s books didn’t carry any advertising at all, so the story was a whopping 32 pages long, Even the inside and back covers were devoted to content rather than ads. So it was a pretty good bargain if you liked the material being produced. And in its way, it was a more realistic treatment of space adventure than a lot of the imaginative nonsense that filled the pages of, say, DC’s science fiction comics. And it reinforced a conformist 1950s-style picture of America as a land of virtue and goodness and right aligned against the interplanetary evils of Communism and having darker skin. (The People’s Free Republic characters were mostly colored in a stereotypical heavy orange hue that made them seem more “other” than most of the actual aliens introduced in this story.)

The inside back cover included a glossary of terms that had been used in the story, which also made it felt as though it was intended for younger readers than myself.

The back cover too was rife with genuine science facts determined to impart some actual educational knowledge upon its impressionable audience–and perhaps to blunt parental criticisms about comic book reading being a waste of time.