When I wrote this piece I believed Max Plaisted was a pseudonym of Jack Binder. This may be incorrect. Max Plaisted was born the same year as Binder (1902) but had his own career.More research is needed…
Comics have a great reputation nowadays. The top grossing films are all based on comics: X-Men, Avengers, Spider-Man, Batman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and so on. If you want to sound a little more high fallutin’, you can call them “graphic novels,” I don’t care. Big writers actually brag about writing comics or having a story adapted into comics. This was not always the case.
In fact, it was worse than that. Comics were an infection in science fiction; only slightly less worse than Venusian snot plague. Many SF writers wrote comics, but they didn’t brag about it. Henry Kuttner, Manly Wade Wellman, Alfred Bester, Eando Binder, Edmond Hamilton, and Harry Harrison who started out as a comic artist and became a famous SF author. But of all the science fiction comics, there is one that is different. Perhaps especially hated or simply ignored, but unusual. I’m talking about “Zarnak.”
Read the rest:
https://www.michaelmay.online/2016/01/zarnak-forgotten-forerunner-guest-post.html
I was expecting the Lin Carter character, who I enjoy. Nice surprise, though