Planet Comics was a sister publication to Fiction House’s quarterly Pulp, Planet Stories. It began in January 1940 and ran for seventy-eight issues, ending in the Winter 1953. Like all comics, these four color masterpieces included one or two page text stories to get the Fourth Class mailing rate. With many publishers, these stories were given no real attention, written by assistants, many who were transient and anonymous. Some comics featured regular writers like Donald Bayne Hobart or Charles S. Strong. The most famous of all of them was Otto Binder, whose Jon Jarl space adventures were a welcome treat in each issue of Captain Marvel Adventures at Fawcett.
If text stories were a necessary evil, why read them now? This may be an acquired taste, but I often find something special in these two-pagers. Sometimes it is the author, a Manly Wade Wellman, a Mickey Spillane or other famous Pulpster. Sometimes I think these stories gave the writers the freedom to do something more spectacular because it wasn’t being drawn. It’s always a gamble though. Some are just plain awful. (I can remember one by Hobart that was a disguised ad for buying War Bonds.)
Not as ambitious as the Jon Jarl saga, was a five-part series in the first year of the comic by “Lin Davies” (a house name). These connected tales starred Captain Dexter Ames and his crew of the Discoverer, including his second-in-command Dr. Phillips, his daughter, Cara, engineer Sept Morgan and Gunner Hatch. They have journey to the newly discovered planet of Alpha Astra to find what has happened to Earth’s sun. Back on Earth, quakes and floods are threatening humanity. The crew must find the secret to the sun-control.
“The Lizard-Men of Alpha Astra” (Planet Comics #3, March 1940) starts with the landing on Alpha Astra. A mouse in a cage is set out first to test the atmosphere. Leaving the ship, the Lizard-Men of the planet take over their vessel. They take Cara and some of the men hostage. The space men attack the lizards, killing many. They capture one of the scaly locals. Dexter uses the aura cap to read the alien’s thoughts. The Earthmen find the captives and the captors in a cave. There is another shoot-out and everyone is rescued. This won’t be the last of the Lizard-Men of Alpha Astra.
“Slaves of the Lizard-Men” (Planet Comics #5, May 1940) begins with Dr. Phillips discovering the Lizard-Men have a captor, and he’s a giant human. Dexter hopes that his race may know the secret of the sun-control. The ship lands and a crew of twenty armed men attack. Lizard-Men die under their ray guns. Dexter goes to free the giant, talking to him with a thought-detector. The giant is a prince of his people. Now free, they take the captive to the ship. A horde of Lizard-Men try to stop them. It looks grim until the giant steps in and helps, smashing lizards left and right. The giant has been saved.
“The Star Pirates” by Lin Davies (Planet Comics #6, June 1940) has three mysterious ships appear. They aren’t Earth-ships or Inter-Planet Patrol vessels. They prove to be Neptune Pirates. The invaders board the Discoverer with plans to enslave the crew for the laboratories of Neptune. But the pirates didn’t count on the ten foot Prince of the First Star, who defeats them. This story uses some very obvious submarine language in their space battle with mention of things like rudders. For more on Space Pirates in Golden Age comics, go here.
“Lost World of Time” by Lin Davies (Planet Comics #7, July 1940) begins with engine trouble after the shoot-out with the pirates. Heading for an asteroid, they find the Earth instead! They have gone through a time-warp and arrived at the Earth of the past. The Discoverer gets involved with a battle between Rome and Atilla the Hun. The astronauts ray down the advanced scouts of the invaders without thought to the timeline. The Romans are thankful and the Earthmen leave.
“Cradle of the World” by Lin Davies (Planet Comics #8, August 1940) has the Discoverer try to break the time-warp but her engines are ruined. They fall back further in time to the Ice Age. The crew are attacked by giant cavemen and two spacemen are killed but not by violence. Dexter and a squad go to retrieve the bodies and find food. More cavemen come and shots are fired. Crewmen fall dead without injury. Dexter stops the firing when he realizes these cavemen are ancestors of the dead men. They have been destroying their own timelines. I guess they learned what they should have realized in the last story. The saga ends here so we never find out what is controlling the sun or how the explorers get back through the time-warp.
Conclusion
The Dexter Ames tales are far from the pages of Astounding Science-Fiction but they were never intended for that audience. They were meant to be fun in the same way a Cowboys & Indians serial or a Spicy Pulp story were meant to be fun. There is no Prime Directive here either. The good guys are Earthmen (and white, no doubt). Writers like Isaac Asimov always blanched when fans included his work along with material of this caliber. I understand that, but other writers like Robert Silverberg, Harry Harrison or Brian W. Aldiss could be a little more nostalgic for these simple products. It’s part of the Buck Rogers heritage, good or bad.
Just a word on the covers for these first issues. Plenty of Wil Eisner as you’ve never seen him before if your experience is limited to The Spirit. You can see how these images were based on the same design as the Pulp covers. Not outright theft but a similar feel to draw in the magazine customers. Later Fiction House will develop their famous Triangle covers (first with the jungle stuff) but eventually use it on all their comics. For more on that, go here. As bad as the writing of the insert stories and their illustrations are, you gotta love those covers!
