The Voice Of ODD!: LOOK! Up In The Sky! It's... What IS That?

05 June 2018

LOOK! Up In The Sky! It's... What IS That?

While prepping this weekend's presentation of Vic Torry And His Flying Saucer, some related comics were piled off to the side, as is often the case around here.

Vic came from the dawn of the modern UFO era and many more followed over the years, gaining greater cultural presence in the late '60s and through the '70s. At the height of the Groovy Age, Gold Key published UFO Flying Saucers. The title lasted for at least seven issues (based on my pile here) between 1968 and 1975.
(Nope. Deeper investigation reveals there are six more issues not in the current pile. UFO ran for 13 issues, through 1977. And another 5 issue series followed from Whitman.)

The book establishes their editorial tone on the inside of the front cover with a short essay on the subject. The basic attitude is covered in the opening three sentences:

WHAT IS A UFO?
UFO simply means Unidentified Flying Object. A UFO is a phenomenon, usually a bright light in the sky, which has been observed but cannot be explained.

A brief overview follows, with this paragraph concluding the piece:

UFOs are nothing new. Sightings were made thousands of years ago. Still they defy all efforts to discover what they really are, where they come from and whether they amount to anything more than an interesting curiosity. In short, UFOs remain one of our most intriguing and persistent mysteries.

Now, don't fret. I didn't just blithely skip the middle. Much of what it had to say was more interestingly presented in some greater detail throughout the book in comic format. Let's go to the introduction, written by Leo Dorfman, along with everything else in the issue, and illustrated by Jet Dream's Joe Certa -

After that rather abrupt stop, the book shifts to short accounts of more modern encounters. Mixed in with those were various speculative pieces, usually 2-pagers like these:

LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS (art by Luiz Dominguez)