Time now to finish up November 2025 right where we sorta started-- with even more King Ward weirdness! This is one seriously silly, sci-fi horror adventure, via the November - December 1951 issue of Forbidden Worlds #3. And while it's off the charts in terms of convoluted craziness, it's also packed with a wild assortment of concepts and cool creature designs. You likely won't forget this one, just as Bruce and Betty never forgot it after they returned to Earth and tried to recapture a little bit of that arousing alien action in the bedroom (see their own amateur home photo attached below!) I've also rounded out the post with yet another ACG "True" ghost quickie, --yep, illustrated by Ward-- and this time from the January - February 1953 issue of Skeleton Hand #3. We'll be heading back to Earth in a few for lots more, --stay tombed!
6 comments:
ACG comics are ridiculously fun. This one has such a bizarre start up, you just got to go with it. I wonder what was up with the human saboteurs in the beginning. What exactly was their motive and from who? Never mind, time to go to outer space! Does Bruce actually need his glasses? He doesn't struggle a bit to see once he loses them and goes from Clark Kent to Superman, punching out monsters! The panels of Betty are fun because of her green dress and how it billows around her. So, forget hell, if we're bad on earth, we get sent to some far off planet when we die! I love how the space sinners have abs! 🤣🤣I love that panel of the new atomic creature shooting some sort of laser beam at the space sinner. I love the fourth panel of Bruce and Betty flying through the air on the last page. That short ghost story amuses me because the guy writing out his looks like he belongs in a Batman comic. That last panel of the ghostly taxi driver kills me for some reason. It's perfect!
Bruce and Betty…. A secret Government testing site… exposure to radiation… interesting they don’t turn green… People really didn’t know what to expect once we reached space did they? I like the cosmic horror turn in the story… Bruce and Betty basically end up in Hell…. Like with Lovecraft space is a kind of breathable “Ether” you can fly through…
This one needs a whole "Things I Learnt From...." listicle. Fortunately I'mtoo lazy to write it.
This comic feels like it was written by committee ... somebody writes a page, and then another guy writes the next page, and everybody has to figure out how to get out of whatever jam they've gotten into (there has been more than one superhero comic that was written that way, especially on shock endings.)
Introducing new characters just to mess with the next writer.
The artwork is great; the 50s space age stuff, the explosions, the planetoid, the monster(s), the fist fighting action, all to service what feels like a fever dream.
Nice little ghost story. I love the thought that the cabbie will be there when he gets tied to the chair! I love the deep eyed villain and smiling cabbie.
I can't name many of them, but it has a kind of Victorian science fiction feeling to it, because so many of those throw out the rules about reaching another planet. And not so much because "They didn't know the rules back then," but for adventure story reasons instead.
(In fact, I know that Edgar Allan Poe wrote a very tongue-in-cheek story about doing it by balloon, just like in this story!)
It's also funny that it sets you up for a big Russian spy story, then the saboteurs get killed right away.
If it hasn't been done yet, it would be nice to see a collection devoted to all those paranormal stories attached to horror comics, like "'True' Ghost Stories" here.
Like probably everyone else, I'm very curious about the photo.
Nothing beats a two-fisted atomic balloon scientist when it comes to adventure heroes. That's way better than "archeologist".
Boy, I sure do love Ward's wild flights of fancy here. The swirling clouds of cosmic weirdness in the splash--and the bottom of page three and the top of page four--are groovy and expressive. I was almost disappointed when the antagonists ended up looking so concrete, but then the design on those guys was really great too (and the model held its own throughout the story--they look like the same monsters from panel to panel).
Besides all that stuff, I'm really smitten with the crash panel on page two and the woosh panel on nine.
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