“Yesterday’s” Comic> Space Adventures #35

In this issue, the Little Prince turns traitor and spies on Earth. Or that’s what I got out of the cover.

Space Adventures vol.3 #35

Charlton Comics Group (August, 1960)

I’m not sure how many more Captain Atom stories there are in this comic before he gets his own series, but that’s as far as we’ll be going. I might return to the title if the Friday edition makes it to 1960 (we’re currently still in 1939), but for now this is still the Tuesday look at pre-DC versions of characters. Still, I’m not just going to read Captain Atom, which means we have four stories to review for this anthology. Let’s get to it!

[Read along with me here]

Spies From Another World

No credits on this one. Be careful what you wish for. This clothing store worker wished for aliens to visit Earth, and they did. Too bad they were scouting for an invasion and stole some of his clothes while he slept, got kicked out of a rocket factory, called us primitive because we needed sleep, and then died because carbon is deadly to them and they were right next to a smokestack. And their ship was crushed because they don’t know what scrap metal is. This story is a nice diversion but hardly anything to it.

The Enigma Of Pluto

No credits again. The last guys came from Uranus in present day. Now we’re off to the future. Only three men have made it back to Pluto. Make that one man, because the other two were duplicates created by the Plutonians as preparation for their invasion of Earth. If we’re such a backwater planet, why does everyone want to invade us? The resolution is really quick (just shoot them) and there doesn’t feel like a lot of stakes. It’s very by the numbers, a plot without strong substance and action.

The Unexpected Visitor

Still no credits unless “Cha-nic and Sal-tra” are supposed to stand for something. And we’re still in the future, but I can’t tell if it’s the same continuity as the last story. Usually in these anthologies it’s not the same continuity. This time it’s Earthlings visiting Mars, learning one of the three nations are evil and want to invade, only to be saved by Mercury. This one is slightly different. It still could have been better had it been longer, and I imagine the other two stories could say the same, but for once Earth attacks someone who doesn’t hold it against us (the Mercury people) and still go on to free the lone evil nation of Mars before it can invade the universe or something. I wonder what they could have done with a longer story.

Captain Atom: The Little Wanderer

Back to present day and we have a definite credit, Steve Ditko. And I have to wonder what Ditko was thinking when he put this final short story together. A gunner’s son is having strange dreams of riding a giant bird creature around the galaxy…and Captain Atom finds out they’re real. The boy really does project into space somehow and has adventures with his friend, but he’s also still here on Earth asleep in his bed and not in another dimension like most sleeping characters…I don’t know how to make sense of this so I won’t. This would not benefit from being longer, just better thought out.

overall

I wonder if anybody won that “live pony” on the cover? Anyway, this was not a great issue. Two stories are too short when they had ideas worthy of a longer story, one was kind of meh, and the one we’re here for in our pre-DC hunt is just too weird for the time and what Captain Atom as a character has done previously. It’s a Silver Age comic trying to be a Golden Age comic, and as someone who has been slowly travelling through the Golden Age comic racks I can tell you it didn’t do it very well.