The Curse of Skeleton Munroe

Category: Cosmic Carson

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 035

    Aliens! Aliens? Aliens.

    the Black-Light Men:

    Like the Emerald Men of Asperus, the Black-Light Men travel on a mobile planet (the Black-Light Planet, natch, so named because it is not visible using conventional light) and like so many Fletcher Hanks villains they are looking to take over the Earth, in this case by pulling the whole planet out of orbit and freezing it solid before selling it on to the Martians. Due to the Black-Light Planet’s perpetual cold, the Black-Light Men are all blubbery. Just what the little rhino horn situation they have going on is for is beyond me. 

    Luckily for the Earth, space hero Whirlwind Carter is on the case and the planet-jacking is halted before more than a measly few million people are killed. Carter leads the Earth military in a retaliatory strike on the Black-Light Planet but it quickly turns into a hand-to hand battle that leaves the human forces ata severe disadvantage.

    Thanks to Whirlwind Carter’s companion Brenda, the Black-Light Men are discovered to have a crippling fear of fire and armed with that knowledge the Earthian forces are able to drive them to self-destruction. (Daring Mystery Comics 005, 1940)

    Serviles: 

    Flip Falcon’s portal to the Fourth Dimension allows him to do a whole lot of different things, for instance: look at images of the planet Mercury and notice that there is a cool-looking city there, then visit that city with his partner Adele. We soon learn that the city is called Servil, and it is inhabited by some truly delightful aliens with the bodies of plucked chickens and the heads of bargain-basement mannequins and who are revealed to be called Serviles in a text box several issues after this appearance.

    The Serviles communicate using extremely cute golden helmets. Up until this point they might just be the perfect alien species, but they have to go and ruin it all by being weird 1940s misogynists and denying women the ability to speak (!) because they “talk too much.”

    Anyway, Servile civilization is plagued by these cool-looking dragonoid beasts called Heidites that crawl over from the hot side of Mercury to eat them, but who could care? (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

    Hoof-Men: 

    The Hoof-Men are 1. extremely burly 2. hoofed and 3. of a class of science fiction alien that can best be described as “space bullies,” who exist to give humans a hard time. In this case they have captured the (also very burly) space explorer Professor Darrel and are threatening to turn him into a bug if he doesn’t say that Hoof-Men are better than humans, and it all gets a little too real until space hero Cosmic Carson has to step in and break things up. (Science Comics 003, 1940)

    Hoppers:

    The Hoppers are yet another group of Fletcher Hanks aliens who live on a wandering planetoid, in this case on that looks just like a cartoon tropical island and seems to just aimlessly float through space. As might be expected given their name the Hoppers a big on jumping and can seemingly do so to get from planet to planet. They have the beefiest legs in comics and show them off in what I can only describe as bicycle shorts, in an astounding bit of predictive design-work.

    Unlike most Fletcher Hanks aliens, the Hoppers don’t have some sort of over-the-top plan to destroy humanity – they aren’t even hostile, as far as I can tell. They do hop on over to Space Smith’s ship as soon as it comes into range, which he interprets as a hostile act, but I’m inclined to disagree. The only aggression the Hoppers display is after they are trapped under a big metal net, and even then it is nonlethal.

    Perhaps Smith agrees with me after all, because instead of gruesomely killing the Hoppers he instead essentially pranks them by bringing them to New York City to be spooked by the hustle and bustle of big city life, with its bodegas and whatnot. Unable to hack the Big Apple, they hop back to their small-town planetoid. (Fantastic Comics 005, 1940)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 030

    Luvverly aliens and so forth for ye today, guv.

    the Freaks: 

    Silver Streak, investigating a series of mysterious murders, follows a lead to the aptly-named Fantasy Isle in the Pacific Ocean. 

    The inhabitants of Fantasy Isle probably don’t refer to themselves as “the Freaks” but as that is the only thing that they are called in-story I suppose that we must go with it. They are a heterogeneous collection of humanoid who have isolated themselves from the world, presumably due to the threat of persecution, which would make them fairly sympathetic characters if a) they didn’t routinely sink passing ships and imprison their crew in deep dank dungeons, and b) their king didn’t respond to the threat of exposure by attempting to destroy the entirety of North America.

    As so often happens when a nonhuman group threatens the lives of a human one, the Silver Streak’s solution involves mass murder, in this case by dumping the entire population into the ocean. One can only hope that a few of them made it, for anti-genocide reasons.

    It’s hard to tell if the Freaks are supposed to be one species with several different morphologies or several different small populations banding together for mutual benefit. Either way, there are a few recurring types. From top to bottom we have: imp type, weird bird man type, tentacle man type and suction cup lizard man type. The king and that three-eyed guy seem to be unique, but maybe there are more of them lurking around in the shadows. (Silver Streak Comics 007, 1941) 

    Gargantuans:

    The Gargantuans are military expansionists who you expect to be big but are in fact regular sized. Instead, they are at or close to the maximum number of facial affectations that an alien species can have, including green skin covered in little spines, antennae, big pointy ears, fangs, a skeleton nose, satanic eyebrows and in the case of their leader Lobar a matching goatee and mustache.

    The Gargantuans come very close to destroying Earth’s space fleet and turning the planet into a military base, until Lobar makes the mistake of bringing Cosmic Carson onto his flagship and getting within reach of his Earthman fists. (Big 3 001, 1940) 

    Mercurians:

    The Red Panther is helping his pal Toni Beltan test her orbital Stratoplane when it goes haywire and rockets them to Mercury. There, they encounter two types of Mercurians: the Giant Mercurians, who wear cool heat-resistant armour that kind of makes them look like beetles and are enslaved by the Surface Mercurians, big-headed imps who are led by a fellow named Kogh and are frankly assholes.

    Kogh has the Red Panther and Toni tossed in a hole to be devoured by the giant bats of Sub-Mercury, only to unexpectedly benefit when the bats all end up dead at the barrel of the Panther’s Atomic converter, thus opening the riches of the underground to exploitation by the resource-poor Surface Mercurians. To his credit, Kogh then has enough grace to allow the duo to return home. (Jungle Comics 010, 1940)

    Giants:

    One of the lost sci-fi tropes is that of the typical kind of humanoid life that you’d find on each planet of the Solar System. Mercury is hot so you get fire guys or other heat-adapted species there; Venus is either a giant swamp or a “primitive” planet so you get a lot of semi-aquatic lizard guys there etc etc. This is all to say that you don’t get ’em any more but because Jupiter is a great big planet one of the standard kinds of Jovians you would see in sci-fi is the giant humanoid, like these fellows, who are conveniently and simply called Giants.

    Golo, ruler of the Giants, has succumbed to arrogance and issued a challenge to the rest of the Solar System to meet his Giant army in personal combat, seemingly as a precursor to a campaign of wholesale conquest. His challenge is met by the Red Comet, who, despite Golo’s initial disbelief, is able to employ his nigh-limitless power to grow extra-huge and lay waste to the Giant forces.

    Golo himself gets away pretty lightly with a mere bop on the snoot for his hubris. Hopefully the hundreds of dead soldiers outside of his palace are enough of a lesson in humility to curb his warlike instincts in the future. (Planet Comics 003, 1940)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 030

    ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 030

    Luvverly aliens and so forth for ye today, guv.

    the Freaks: 

    Silver Streak, investigating a series of mysterious murders, follows a lead to the aptly-named Fantasy Isle in the Pacific Ocean. 

    The inhabitants of Fantasy Isle probably don’t refer to themselves as “the Freaks” but as that is the only thing that they are called in-story I suppose that we must go with it. They are a heterogeneous collection of humanoid who have isolated themselves from the world, presumably due to the threat of persecution, which would make them fairly sympathetic characters if a) they didn’t routinely sink passing ships and imprison their crew in deep dank dungeons, and b) their king didn’t respond to the threat of exposure by attempting to destroy the entirety of North America.

    As so often happens when a nonhuman group threatens the lives of a human one, the Silver Streak’s solution involves mass murder, in this case by dumping the entire population into the ocean. One can only hope that a few of them made it, for anti-genocide reasons.

    It’s hard to tell if the Freaks are supposed to be one species with several different morphologies or several different small populations banding together for mutual benefit. Either way, there are a few recurring types. From top to bottom we have: imp type, weird bird man type, tentacle man type and suction cup lizard man type. The king and that three-eyed guy seem to be unique, but maybe there are more of them lurking around in the shadows. (Silver Streak Comics 007, 1941) 

    Gargantuans:

    The Gargantuans are military expansionists who you expect to be big but are in fact regular sized. Instead, they are at or close to the maximum number of facial affectations that an alien species can have, including green skin covered in little spines, antennae, big pointy ears, fangs, a skeleton nose, satanic eyebrows and in the case of their leader Lobar a matching goatee and mustache.

    The Gargantuans come very close to destroying Earth’s space fleet and turning the planet into a military base, until Lobar makes the mistake of bringing Cosmic Carson onto his flagship and getting within reach of his Earthman fists. (Big 3 001, 1940) 

    Mercurians:

    The Red Panther is helping his pal Toni Beltan test her orbital Stratoplane when it goes haywire and rockets them to Mercury. There, they encounter two types of Mercurians: the Giant Mercurians, who wear cool heat-resistant armour that kind of makes them look like beetles and are enslaved by the Surface Mercurians, big-headed imps who are led by a fellow named Kogh and are frankly assholes.

    Kogh has the Red Panther and Toni tossed in a hole to be devoured by the giant bats of Sub-Mercury, only to unexpectedly benefit when the bats all end up dead at the barrel of the Panther’s Atomic converter, thus opening the riches of the underground to exploitation by the resource-poor Surface Mercurians. To his credit, Kogh then has enough grace to allow the duo to return home. (Jungle Comics 010, 1940)

    Giants:

    One of the lost sci-fi tropes is that of the typical kind of humanoid life that you’d find on each planet of the Solar System. Mercury is hot so you get fire guys or other heat-adapted species there; Venus is either a giant swamp or a “primitive” planet so you get a lot of semi-aquatic lizard guys there etc etc. This is all to say that you don’t get ’em any more but because Jupiter is a great big planet one of the standard kinds of Jovians you would see in sci-fi is the giant humanoid, like these fellows, who are conveniently and simply called Giants.

    Golo, ruler of the Giants, has succumbed to arrogance and issued a challenge to the rest of the Solar System to meet his Giant army in personal combat, seemingly as a precursor to a campaign of wholesale conquest. His challenge is met by the Red Comet, who, despite Golo’s initial disbelief, is able to employ his nigh-limitless power to grow extra-huge and lay waste to the Giant forces.

    Golo himself gets away pretty lightly with a mere bop on the snoot for his hubris. Hopefully the hundreds of dead soldiers outside of his palace are enough of a lesson in humility to curb his warlike instincts in the future. (Planet Comics 003, 1940)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 023

    A fine batch of aliens for ye this day, sor! 

    Inferians: 

    The wandering planet Inferno threatens to destroy the Earth with its heat, and the magician Zambini (plus some lady and the mad astronomer Professor Stargaze) travel to its surface in an attempt to cool it down. There they find the Inferians, charmingly can-shaped aliens made out of heat-resistant glass.

    We learn more information than usual about this alien culture from a handy text box: the nearby Inferian city is called Cinderburg, and the tap-based language is called Clink. From an Inferian tranformed into a human we learn that the king of Inferno is known as the Great Glassblower, plus the fact that Inferians can be horny.

    The Great Glassblower is implied to have made the Inferians somehow, so I had expected him to be some other manner of being but instead he is just a slightly better-dressed Inferian with a hostile attitude and a bowl full of molten glass that he’s not afraid to throw at intruders. Zambini nonetheless manages to seal up the huge volcano that is the source of Inferno’s great heat (and hopefully not important for maintaining the lives of the Inferians somehow) and thus Earth is saved! (Zip Comics 002, 1940)

    Etherians and Rodongees: 

    After helping the Barrangees move back to the surface of their world and defeat the giant insect species that had driven them underground in the first place, Captain Tornado and his fellow Earthicans were probably ready for a bit of a break from inter-species combat. Well, tough luck, because upon closer inspection, some of the giant insects flying around the surface of Barrang were not insects at all but insect-shaped vehicles piloted by four-armed, blue-haired guys with fragile constitutions and a bad attitude, and Tornado, his friends and a whole bunch of Barrangees are rounded up and taken prisoner by them.

    Their jailers turn out to be called Etherians, and the Etherians turn out to be jerks who have already enslaved a race called the Rodongees and now propose to do the same to the Barrangees. Tornado and his party fall in with a group of freedom-fighting Rodongees and pledge to help them overthrow the Etherians once and for all… and that is the end of the “Captain Tornado” feature. I sure hope they managed to complete their mission without having any more alien trouble on Barrang! (Popular Comics 056, 1940)

    the Evil Gods: 

    Ted Hunt and Jane Martin, the Star Rovers, are making an exploratory stop on Venus when they are captured by a tribe of post-apocalyptic Venusians, but just what exactly was the apocalypse that made them so? They soon find out when they witness a Venusian hunter being chased down and seemingly eaten by a robot referred to as one of the “Evil Gods.”

    And just what are the Evil Gods? Once Ted beats up the Venusian king he gets the story of how his people found six of them deep underground in some sort of suspended animation and how once they were accidentally revived they enslaved the former Venusian civilization and reduced the few free members of the species to starving in isolated swamps. Ted, now king of the Venusians, vows to free the people from the tyranny of the Evil Gods.

    Ted and Jane set out to find food and are immediately captured and transported back to the Evil Gods’ seat of power, where they learn that the tyrant beings are not in fact robots but blobby green aliens that use the impervious robotic exoskeletons to protect their frail flesh. 

    Ted escapes to retrieve his spaceship and takes advantage of the Gods’ habit of sleeping outside of their shells to kill five of them. The sixth, on watch over the Venusian slaves, is lassoed and dragged into a cave where it is then sealed, hopefully for all time. The Venusians (and Jane) are free! (Exciting Comics 003, 1940)

    Fang Men: 

    The Fang Men of Jupiter (or Jupitor, as it appears here) might have a rich and beautiful society that values poetry and art and presumably good dentistry but alas that is not how we encounter them while reading the adventures of Cosmic Carson. 

    Instead, all of the Fang Men we meet are space pirates, and particularly jerky ones at that. We can only hope that this is not an accurate picture of Fang-Man society as a whole. (Science Comics 001, 1940)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 023

    A fine batch of aliens for ye this day, sor! 

    Inferians: 

    The wandering planet Inferno threatens to destroy the Earth with its heat, and the magician Zambini (plus some lady and the mad astronomer Professor Stargaze) travel to its surface in an attempt to cool it down. There they find the Inferians, charmingly can-shaped aliens made out of heat-resistant glass.

    We learn more information than usual about this alien culture from a handy text box: the nearby Inferian city is called Cinderburg, and the tap-based language is called Clink. From an Inferian tranformed into a human we learn that the king of Inferno is known as the Great Glassblower, plus the fact that Inferians can be horny.

    The Great Glassblower is implied to have made the Inferians somehow, so I had expected him to be some other manner of being but instead he is just a slightly better-dressed Inferian with a hostile attitude and a bowl full of molten glass that he’s not afraid to throw at intruders. Zambini nonetheless manages to seal up the huge volcano that is the source of Inferno’s great heat (and hopefully not important for maintaining the lives of the Inferians somehow) and thus Earth is saved! (Zip Comics 002, 1940)

    Etherians and Rodongees: 

    After helping the Barrangees move back to the surface of their world and defeat the giant insect species that had driven them underground in the first place, Captain Tornado and his fellow Earthicans were probably ready for a bit of a break from inter-species combat. Well, tough luck, because upon closer inspection, some of the giant insects flying around the surface of Barrang were not insects at all but insect-shaped vehicles piloted by four-armed, blue-haired guys with fragile constitutions and a bad attitude, and Tornado, his friends and a whole bunch of Barrangees are rounded up and taken prisoner by them.

    Their jailers turn out to be called Etherians, and the Etherians turn out to be jerks who have already enslaved a race called the Rodongees and now propose to do the same to the Barrangees. Tornado and his party fall in with a group of freedom-fighting Rodongees and pledge to help them overthrow the Etherians once and for all… and that is the end of the “Captain Tornado” feature. I sure hope they managed to complete their mission without having any more alien trouble on Barrang! (Popular Comics 056, 1940)

    the Evil Gods: 

    Ted Hunt and Jane Martin, the Star Rovers, are making an exploratory stop on Venus when they are captured by a tribe of post-apocalyptic Venusians, but just what exactly was the apocalypse that made them so? They soon find out when they witness a Venusian hunter being chased down and seemingly eaten by a robot referred to as one of the “Evil Gods.”

    And just what are the Evil Gods? Once Ted beats up the Venusian king he gets the story of how his people found six of them deep underground in some sort of suspended animation and how once they were accidentally revived they enslaved the former Venusian civilization and reduced the few free members of the species to starving in isolated swamps. Ted, now king of the Venusians, vows to free the people from the tyranny of the Evil Gods.

    Ted and Jane set out to find food and are immediately captured and transported back to the Evil Gods’ seat of power, where they learn that the tyrant beings are not in fact robots but blobby green aliens that use the impervious robotic exoskeletons to protect their frail flesh. 

    Ted escapes to retrieve his spaceship and takes advantage of the Gods’ habit of sleeping outside of their shells to kill five of them. The sixth, on watch over the Venusian slaves, is lassoed and dragged into a cave where it is then sealed, hopefully for all time. The Venusians (and Jane) are free! (Exciting Comics 003, 1940)

    Fang Men: 

    The Fang Men of Jupiter (or Jupitor, as it appears here) might have a rich and beautiful society that values poetry and art and presumably good dentistry but alas that is not how we encounter them while reading the adventures of Cosmic Carson. 

    Instead, all of the Fang Men we meet are space pirates, and particularly jerky ones at that. We can only hope that this is not an accurate picture of Fang-Man society as a whole. (Science Comics 001, 1940)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 022

    Top-quality aliens, fresh-baked! 

    Unnamed Species:

    This unnamed species has that most delightful and implausible of features, an organic wheel that they use to locomote around! Other than that they’re your typical underground dwelling species: they live far enough under the surface or have an extensive enough range that one can enter their kingdom in the Himalayas and exit in Iran; they have a captured surface woman named Rina as their queen but the real power lies with “He”, who is four or five times bigger than the rest of his species; and they are very sensitive to sound. Regular stuff. 

    Those wheels though! (Wonderworld Comics 011, 1940)

    Earth-Men: 

    The Earth-Men are the fellows who worship the ancestor-god Sakka, as detailed in a Divine Round-Up a couple of months back. They’re little bug-eyed guys with a high incidence of male-pattern baldness and a hostile attitude until adventurer Rocky Ryan kind of accidentally convinces them that he is the reincarnation of Sakka. 

    In the peaceful times that follow, Ryan’s companion Professor Ames is able to explore the Earth-Man city and make some frankly astounding discoveries, including the facts that 

    1: There used to be a land mass spanning the Pacific between South America and Asia 

    2. At the time, Earth had 2 moons, one of which then exploded

    3. The force of the exploding moon sank the Pacific continent

    4. The Earth-Men are the remnants of that Pacific civilization, and their shrunken stature and big ol’ eyes are a result of living in a dense jungle, somehow.

    It’s a real upending of everything that we thought we knew about the history of the Earth, plus now Ames has enough material for a book. Publish or perish, huzzah! (Big Shot Comics 014, 1941)

    Mercurians (Three Types):  

    Space Adventurer Flint Baker and his companion Mimi make their way to the planet Mercury, where he finds a city strewn with humanoid corpses. Eventually, they find a single survivor, who reveals that he is the last of the Western Hemisphere Mercurians, the rest having been wiped out by…

    … the Eastern Hemisphere Mercurians, a rowdy bunch of cave-man types who storm in and kidnap Mimi before Flint can do anything to prevent it. Through a series of battles, he recovers Mimi and seemingly wipes out the Eastern Mercurians in turn. Mercury is now an uninhabited planet.

    But not for long, because Flint then uses the atomic conversion pistol gifted to him by the last of the Western Mercurians to make a whole new batch of hot Mercurians out of some nearby flowers and install them in the now-deserted city. (Planet Comics 006, 1940)

    Erostians: 

    After space vigilante Cosmic Carson’s men shoot down a pirate ship over planetoid Eros, both they and the pirates’ victims come under attack by the green, caveman-like Erostians, who carry off as many women as they can get their grubby green mitts on (bonus entry: these women are all Venusians).

    Cosmic Carson himself sets out to rescue the captives and ends up a prisoner himself, wherein he learns that the Erostians are not simply a species of humanoid aliens, but the former dominant species of Earth, thrown down and banished to Eros by some ancient scientist. Plus, they eat people, with a preference for pretty women. It’s actually a bit of a roller coaster, as the standard alien lust for human (or humanoid) women is explained by the fact that the Erostians are also human or at least homo but then their desire turns out not to be lust but gluttony and thus back in the realm of the inexplicable.

    Anyway, Cosmic Carson blasts most of them to smithereens. (Science Comics 005, 1940)

  • ALIENS AND SO FORTH ROUND-UP 022

    Top-quality aliens, fresh-baked! 

    Unnamed Species:

    This unnamed species has that most delightful and implausible of features, an organic wheel that they use to locomote around! Other than that they’re your typical underground dwelling species: they live far enough under the surface or have an extensive enough range that one can enter their kingdom in the Himalayas and exit in Iran; they have a captured surface woman named Rina as their queen but the real power lies with “He”, who is four or five times bigger than the rest of his species; and they are very sensitive to sound. Regular stuff. 

    Those wheels though! (Wonderworld Comics 011, 1940)

    Earth-Men: 

    The Earth-Men are the fellows who worship the ancestor-god Sakka, as detailed in a Divine Round-Up a couple of months back. They’re little bug-eyed guys with a high incidence of male-pattern baldness and a hostile attitude until adventurer Rocky Ryan kind of accidentally convinces them that he is the reincarnation of Sakka. 

    In the peaceful times that follow, Ryan’s companion Professor Ames is able to explore the Earth-Man city and make some frankly astounding discoveries, including the facts that 

    1: There used to be a land mass spanning the Pacific between South America and Asia 

    2. At the time, Earth had 2 moons, one of which then exploded

    3. The force of the exploding moon sank the Pacific continent

    4. The Earth-Men are the remnants of that Pacific civilization, and their shrunken stature and big ol’ eyes are a result of living in a dense jungle, somehow.

    It’s a real upending of everything that we thought we knew about the history of the Earth, plus now Ames has enough material for a book. Publish or perish, huzzah! (Big Shot Comics 014, 1941)

    Mercurians (Three Types):  

    Space Adventurer Flint Baker and his companion Mimi make their way to the planet Mercury, where he finds a city strewn with humanoid corpses. Eventually, they find a single survivor, who reveals that he is the last of the Western Hemisphere Mercurians, the rest having been wiped out by…

    … the Eastern Hemisphere Mercurians, a rowdy bunch of cave-man types who storm in and kidnap Mimi before Flint can do anything to prevent it. Through a series of battles, he recovers Mimi and seemingly wipes out the Eastern Mercurians in turn. Mercury is now an uninhabited planet.

    But not for long, because Flint then uses the atomic conversion pistol gifted to him by the last of the Western Mercurians to make a whole new batch of hot Mercurians out of some nearby flowers and install them in the now-deserted city. (Planet Comics 006, 1940)

    Erostians: 

    After space vigilante Cosmic Carson’s men shoot down a pirate ship over planetoid Eros, both they and the pirates’ victims come under attack by the green, caveman-like Erostians, who carry off as many women as they can get their grubby green mitts on (bonus entry: these women are all Venusians).

    Cosmic Carson himself sets out to rescue the captives and ends up a prisoner himself, wherein he learns that the Erostians are not simply a species of humanoid aliens, but the former dominant species of Earth, thrown down and banished to Eros by some ancient scientist. Plus, they eat people, with a preference for pretty women. It’s actually a bit of a roller coaster, as the standard alien lust for human (or humanoid) women is explained by the fact that the Erostians are also human or at least homo but then their desire turns out not to be lust but gluttony and thus back in the realm of the inexplicable.

    Anyway, Cosmic Carson blasts most of them to smithereens. (Science Comics 005, 1940)

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 723: IAKO

    (Science Comics 004, 1940)

    Cosmic Carson is a fairly generic space hero whose main distinction up to this point was that each issue he fought a different kind of alien with a cool species name (from Science Comics 001 and going forward: the Fang-Men of Jupiter, the Skull-Men and the Hoof-Men), but other than that he wasn’t really of interest to us on this here blog. Until now, that is, because Science Comics 004 features a Cosmic Carson adventure illustrated and possibly written by the King himself, Jack Kirby.

    So: Fort Roosevelt on Mars has been destroyed, and Cosmic Carson is convinced that it was the work of the space pirate Elramis. While hunting for her, he encounters a lone space-suited figure engaged in a firefight with what turns out to be a bunch of thought-controlled androids belonging to the Saturnian trader Iako which causes Iako to jump straight to the top of Carson’s list of suspects.

    While Carson gets some credit for working out the identity of the culprit about five minutes before Iako himself shows up to lay out his entire plan, he loses much more for failing to realize that the woman he had just been battling robots with was in fact Elramis, the original object of his investigations. Perhaps Mars is just the kind of place where that isn’t a remarkable occurrence, but even so he might have checked.

    Iako and Elramis have some sort of thing going on, but the nature of what exactly it is is not explored in the course of the story. The upshot of it, whatever it is, is that Elramis is left to her own devices once everyone is back on Iako’s ship while Cosmic Carson is in for some sort of deathtrap, if Iako has anything to say about it. Thanks to a bit of psychological manipulation on Elramis’ part, however, Carson is able to turn the tables on Iako in a very satisfying looking headlock.

    Sadly there was no second instalment of this particular story so we will never know just why Elramis has taken over the ship or what the ultimate fate of Iako would be. Or, for that matter, why the colourist refused to colour the neck part of Elramis’ spacesuit so that it didn’t look like she had a weird seam under her jawline.

  • MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 723: IAKO

    MINOR SUPER-VILLAIN 723: IAKO

    (Science Comics 004, 1940)

    Cosmic Carson is a fairly generic space hero whose main distinction up to this point was that each issue he fought a different kind of alien with a cool species name (from Science Comics 001 and going forward: the Fang-Men of Jupiter, the Skull-Men and the Hoof-Men), but other than that he wasn’t really of interest to us on this here blog. Until now, that is, because Science Comics 004 features a Cosmic Carson adventure illustrated and possibly written by the King himself, Jack Kirby.

    So: Fort Roosevelt on Mars has been destroyed, and Cosmic Carson is convinced that it was the work of the space pirate Elramis. While hunting for her, he encounters a lone space-suited figure engaged in a firefight with what turns out to be a bunch of thought-controlled androids belonging to the Saturnian trader Iako which causes Iako to jump straight to the top of Carson’s list of suspects.

    While Carson gets some credit for working out the identity of the culprit about five minutes before Iako himself shows up to lay out his entire plan, he loses much more for failing to realize that the woman he had just been battling robots with was in fact Elramis, the original object of his investigations. Perhaps Mars is just the kind of place where that isn’t a remarkable occurrence, but even so he might have checked.

    Iako and Elramis have some sort of thing going on, but the nature of what exactly it is is not explored in the course of the story. The upshot of it, whatever it is, is that Elramis is left to her own devices once everyone is back on Iako’s ship while Cosmic Carson is in for some sort of deathtrap, if Iako has anything to say about it. Thanks to a bit of psychological manipulation on Elramis’ part, however, Carson is able to turn the tables on Iako in a very satisfying looking headlock.

    Sadly there was no second instalment of this particular story so we will never know just why Elramis has taken over the ship or what the ultimate fate of Iako would be. Or, for that matter, why the colourist refused to colour the neck part of Elramis’ spacesuit so that it didn’t look like she had a weird seam under her jawline.