Tarzan Powers Activate!

Richard Powers was a popular artist with an arresting and distinctive style who did the cover for scores if not hundreds of books. He was called upon by Ballantine Books to supply covers for their line of authorized paperback reprints of the Edgar Rice Burroughs creation. His artwork is at once attractive and strange and not at all what one might expect for a blood and thunder property of this type. The abstractness of many of the images makes for an effective cover, if not necessarily the most powerful jungle scene. Below is a gallery of the Powers covers. These are the best scans of these handsome covers that I was able to gather.

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Solar Reflections One!

Dated October 1962 the debut issue of Doctor Solar hit the stands as the fledgling Gold Key brand was first trying to establish itself after the split from Dell. The talents at Western Publications were eager to try out their own stuff and adding a "superhero" seemed necessary for  a comics company. Under a lush and mysterious Richard Powers cover, this comic seemed to be what it was -- a strange blend of science fiction and superheroics, with less attention on the latter.

In the debut story "Doctor Solar's Secret", we meet Doctor Philip Solar, a nuclear physicist who works at Atomic Valley. There he is trapped inside a sabotaged nuclear pile and the radiation, which kills his colleague does not kill him, instead he finds himself changed and weirdly quickened by the radioactivity. His skin becomes a vivid green and he seems to be dead save that he isn't. The only person who knows his secret is Dr.Clarkson, his boss, who works with Solar to keep him alive by giving him access to radiation he needs. Ignorant of his true nature is Gail Sanders, a newly arrived and quite attractive scientist who is smitten with Solar. The man behind the sabotage is the mysterious Nuro, who will be the villain throughout the series.In the second story "An Atomic Inferno" the agent of Nuro runs afoul of Gail and stops her and destroy Atom Valley before she can reveal his secrets, but not before Solar can save the day. The agent pays for his failures.

Esteemed science fiction artist Richard Powers does the first two covers for the series run before George Wilson takes over. The artwork on the early issues is by Bob Fujitani and it is stellar, offering up the a nicely dramatic but still exceedingly real world for Solar to operate in. Frank Bolle became the regular artist with the sixth issue and his style is certainly in the spirit of Fujitani's but alas to my eye lacks some of the power. The ubiquitous Paul Newman writes the scripts for all the Solar comics, and Matt Murphy is given credit as co-writer.

In subsequent issues we get stories like "Remote-Controlled Traitor" which has Gail Sanders kidnapped by Nuro's agents and she becomes a saboteur before she is confronted and saved by Solar, and  "The Night of the Volcano" has Solar leaving the confines of his laboratory and rushing to save the region from a tremendous volcanic eruption which had been unwittingly triggered by experiments from Atom Valley itself. Eventually he visits undersea cities and confronts aliens other scientists with odd and sometimes villainous goals. Always the mysterious and malevolent Nuro is lurking behind the scenes,even sending a robot to infiltrate Blue Valley in one issue. 

These early stories have a specific science fiction feel to them, as the always staid and conservative Gold Key folks were really reluctant to tap the superhero vein, but rather wanted to market a character who was just a scientist with an unusual condition. They seemed to be designing for television shows rather than superhero comics. Of course they eventually relented and gave Doctor Solar a costume in the fourth issue, but the nature of the stories really didn't change all that much in these early issues. All the stories were written by the phenomenal Paul S. Newman save for the seventh which was written by Otto Binder.

Here are the covers for the first seven issues. 

More "Solar Reflections" to come next Sunday.

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Who Goes There?

Hannes Bok

I was fishing around in my dangerously overly-stuffed garage and stumbled across a box full of vintage Science Fiction Book Club collections. I used to get reams of neat stuff from this venerable source, at one time a ready window to the classics of sci-fi. A lot the books have gone away over time, but I've always kept my "Best of..." collections as a way to maintain access to some of more famous old stories. A few months ago, after finally seeing the most recent "Thing" movie (see here for more), I had the urge to read "Who Goes There?", John W. Campbell's classic story which triggered off some of my favorite sci-fi movie classics, but alas I couldn't find it.

But find it at last I did, and last evening sitting nestled comfortably in my dangerously over-stuffed garage (which I heat and keep a comfortable chair in for just these matters) I read Campbell's classic creepy story for the first time in decades. Needless to say the walk back into the house in the cold darkness was maybe, perhaps a tiny bit more uncomfortable than normal. Great little tale of creeping paranoia this one is.

The tale of an isolated party of Antarctic professional explorers isolated with a dangerous and deadly and recently re-quickened shape-shifting alien from twenty-five million years before and no counting how many miles is a classic scenario, rarely to be matched.

If you would like to read it, it turns out it is available online at this very nifty location. Why I didn't stumble across this resource earlier this summer is anyone's guess. But by all means check it out.

From Doc Savage Fantasy Covers

One of the most intriguing things about the story which I've come across in more recent years is the notion that it is a stealth Doc Savage adventure, Doc being in reality the main character "McReady" (played by Kurt Russell in the John Carpenter movie). I was always rather skeptical, but after reading this tale again, notably published by Conde Nast, the company which holds and still guards the Doc Savage copyright, in Astounding Science Fiction in 1938 it makes me wonder.

McReady is very directly described as a giant man of bronze with bronze hair and eyes and his role in the story is perfectly consistent with what a young and somewhat less experienced Doc might've done in that situation. According to the Wold Newton chronology this tale would've happened prior to Doc forming the Fab Five and officially beginning his good works. I'm sure it a mere coincidence, but it's an above average tantalizing one. If it were a Doc story, it might bear the title "The Three-Eyed Goblin" or "The Twenty-Five Million Year Menace".

Richard Powers

And for those who like comics best, here's a link to an adaptation of the story which appeared in Starstream in the late 70's by  Arnold Drake and Jack Abel. Enjoy!

"Who Goes There?" is a danged good yarn, one that strikes closer to who we think we are than we like.

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The Powers Of Tarzan!

Richard Powers was a popular artist with an arresting and distinctive style who did the cover for scores if not hundreds of books. He was called upon by Ballantine Books to supply covers for their line of authorized paperback reprints of the Edgar Rice Burroughs creation.

His artwork is at once attractive and strange and not at all what one might expect for a blood and thunder property of this type. The abstractness of many of the images makes for an effective cover, if not necessarily the most powerful jungle scene.

Below is a gallery of the Powers covers. These are the best scans of these handsome covers that I was able to gather.























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