If you missed the last one…
Airboy Returns – Part 2 picks up right where we left off. Airboy is in the Arctic to solve the mystery of the rising sea levels. He encounters an old enemy, Zzed. The insane scientist has but one purpose: to destroy the entire planet and kill all humanity. As a side effect of his melting the Arctic ice, prehistoric animals are being revived.
As with the last issue, the writing and art were done by Ernest Schroeder.
A quick flashback shows us Airboy discovering the mysterious glowing rock that is melting the ice. And the monsters around him are awakening.
He escapes by flying out of the pit. Last time we didn’t get to see what happens next. Zzed gets knocked in while Airboy flies out with the red rock.
He drops the glowing stone and it explodes. Airboy is knocked unconscious.
Weird side note: in 1973 Marvel Comics would adapt Lin Carter’s Sword & Sorcery novel, The Wizard of Lemuria (1965). Check out this second issue opening title page…. I’m not sure if it was Lin Carter, Roy Thomas, George Alec Effenger or Val Mayerik, but somebody in there was an Airboy Fan. Maybe all four.
Airboy regains consciousness and flies to a Seabees base. He gets some medical aid and a bed for the night. And then a visitor!
Airboy captures the fiend. One of the officers admits he allowed the old man to enter. Airboy realizes the man was hypnotized. Airboy puts the villain in his plane to take him back to civilization. Unfortunately, the mastodons are free…
Rifles are ineffective but a good bulldozer works.
Like Captain Marvel Jr. seven years earlier, Airboy uses a convenient cliff to dispatch them. Zzed makes his move to escape while Airboy is busy with a pterodon.
In an aerial battle that recalls Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The People That Time Forgot (1918), pilot must fight the flying monster. The hungry creature takes Zzed.
The Seabees continue the bulldozer attack, while Airboy strafes the charging behemoths.
Airboy gets knocked out of the air and finds there are worse things than mastodons.
The T. rex goes for the charging elephant and a battle worthy of Ray Harryhausen ensues.
The bulldozers reward the dinosaur by burying him in ice. Airboy has a close call.
The prehistoric monsters are all returned to the ice. Far away, Zzed escapes being eaten by a pterodon, killing the creature. He will be back in a future issue of the comic.
Wow! What a lot of excitement! The frozen mammoth (in this case mastodons) coming back to life started the whole concept of prehistoric beasts reviving in our time. Jack London wrote “A Relic of the Pleistocene” back in 1901 after frozen mammoths were found in Siberia. The idea found its way into adventure fiction, then Pulp fiction and finally comic books. After Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” dinosaurs were as likely as mammoths. To Ernest Schroeder’s credit, he did it before all the others.
These and other Airboy comics are available free at DCM.