Comedians in the ’40s and ’50s had comic books. They were good publicity, plus you didn’t have to do any of the work. Other people wrote and drew them, trying to capture the essence of the stars, using their wisecracks and typical jokes. What was different was that the writers quickly ran out of regular stuff to do and had to find a new gimmick for each issue. This lead to Western scenarios, Northern scenarios, Foreign Legion scenarios, jungle scenarios, etc. Eventually they got to the space stuff.
Before October 4, 1957 stories about space were considered “that Buck Rogers stuff.” So it shouldn’t be any surprise to see the comedians with comics using space travel for laughs. This was not cutting edge science fiction but retreads of pulps and worse, comic strip and serial science fiction. Silver underwear, beautiful alien women, that kind of thing. You can almost see the strings on the spaceship models. The writers knew Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon but hadn’t even heard of Ray Bradbury or Isaac Asimov.
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2015/03/moon-laughs-comedians-in-space-guest.html
