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Sunday, September 27, 2009


Number 600


The Marvel Family and the Great Space Struggle


The Marvel Family #75, from 1952, is a comic I've wanted to show for quite some time. It's drawn by Kurt Schaffenberger, good in itself, but written in his inimitable Captain Marvel style by Otto Binder. Otto, who was science fiction writer Eando Binder (he started out collaborating with his brother Earl, hence Earl and Otto Binder), had a light touch with dialogue and captions, and kept the stories moving fast, with some funny moments.

I like that it's one of those future-in-the-past stories, which I define as a story with a year designated as the future, and yet is in our real world past. We get to see how far off the mark the predictions are. In "The Great Space Struggle!" 1960 is the future year, just eight years from the date of the comic book, but already far enough--according to the story--that we have rocket ships heading for other planets. Binder ignores time travel paradoxes. The Marvels would meet themselves in the future, just eight years older, and their future selves would remember and anticipate what was going to happen in 1960, blah blah blah...

It's a fun story with fine artwork.

























4 comments:

bazarov said...

Fantastic post as always, Pappy. The Marvel Family are one of my faves.

Chuck Wells said...

Wonderful, wonderful post, Pappy. I absolutely love Kurt Schaffenberger's artwork and really regret never having gotten a chance to tell him so.

One of these days, I hope to track down an affordable original page or sketch by Kurt.

This post beats the Vampire World post (and that one was pretty durn good).

Daniel [oeconomist.com] said...

The immediate question would be of why the Marvel Family wouldn't have defeated the Sivanas without time travel. Wouldn't the Marvels have just fought the Sivana's as soon as they'd reappeared?

But the answer, of course, is that the Marvels would be in suspended animation in 1960, because of DC.

Runs.with.Ferals said...

Yeah~ what a shame Fawcett people couldn't travel back in time and alter the result of DC's bogus lawsuit against them. The Big Red Cheese hasn't been the same since !