Tuesday, May 9, 2017

Tour The Solar System With Murphy Anderson!!

Throughout it's run, Fiction House's Planet Comics ran a recurring feature, "Life On Other Worlds."

And a good many of them were drawn by Murphy Anderson:


Sometimes they were one-pagers, sometimes two-pagers...sometime two pagers were broken up and run in separate issues as one-pagers...

Anderson visited much of the solar system, and even some of the moons of other planets:

Not even the asteroids were safe...

Some of these were taken and reprinted in other comics. This Saturn one, for example, was re-colored and run in another comic 5 years later, as I blogged about here.


Other artists worked on the feature, too, apparently with little editorial supervision--at least two other people did entries for Mercury, all of them mutually incompatible with each other.


No writer is credited for any of the pieces, so we don't know whom to blame credit for the childish flights of fancy hard science facts given to us in these bits.


Regardless of any inaccuracies, these pieces brim with Anderson's still-developing design sense, intrepid space explorers and alien landscapes bursting off the page.


And of course, you can't have life throughout the solar system without...SPACE POLICE!!


Thanks for the tour, Murphy!!

From various issues of Planet Comics (1945-1948)

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