Saturday Matinee With Vana, Danny, & Mitzi

With my personal obsession with 3, it should come as no surprise that today's matinee is, once again, a triple feature.

First up, our ongoing serial - our fourth chapter of Oskar Lebeck & Alden McWilliams' classic newspaper strip, Twin Earths. Then we've got the return of Joe Kubert's Danny Dreams, and the return of Matt Baker with a new strip for this blog, Mitzi Of The Movies.

Previously on Twin Earths: Vana, an agent from Terra - the world orbiting the sun opposite of the Earth - has managed to convince the FBI of her origins and her desire to defect to our planet. Agents of Terra, having already eliminated Vana's partner, are now attempting to terminate Vana as well...

Twin Earths - Chapter 4:

To Be Continued...

We're skipping ahead to the 4th appearance of Danny Dreams today. His 2nd & 3rd tales originally appeared in 3-D Comics #s 2(a) & 2(b). They've been reprinted a few times in 3D, and at least once with the 3D removed. Haven't found that comic yet, nor the ambition to create a non-3D version myself (yet), and so it's on to #4. This one has another surprise - while Joe Kubert continued scripting, this time Alex Toth stepped up for the art chores!

No worries - we'll check in with Danny again tomorrow.

Finally, we've got Matt Baker back again. Matt's the artist behind a couple of our Fly Girls - Sky Girl and Canteen Kate. In addition to his lovely ladies, once again we see him using colour plates to handle some of the primary inks for non-corporeal images. This was something done rarely enough that it seemed like a brilliant innovation decades later when the Legion Of Super-Heroes started using the same technique for holographic communications and such. (It was Keith Giffen doing that, right?)

Mitzi Of The Movies ran in Movie Comics, which featured a mix of movie adaptations and comics that took place around the movies - such as Captain Stand-In and Johnny Danger Of The Screenland Patrol. Movie Comics folded after four issues, and she only appeared in those four stories ... sort of.

We'll get to that another time. For now, this is her second appearance, from Movie Comics #2 -

page art from Twin Earths, Tor #3, and Movie Comics #2 (1952, 1946, 1954)

Flights Of Imagination

Sky Girl, as we've seen before, had dreams of flying and adventure. Sometimes, that was very literally the case, as with our two tales today -

Ginger Maguire was always prone to flights of fancy, so it seems only natural that they embraced that idea and run with it...

Of course, there's always the old standby - the conk on the noggin approach ...

pages by Matt Baker from Jumbo Comics #s 78 & 80 (1945)

Canteen Kate - No-Fly Girl

Yesterday we were looking at Sky Girl, the latest in our parade of Fly Girls. Today, let's visit with a "cousin" of hers - Canteen Kate. Kate and Ginger are both redheads who cope with the kitchen at an airfield, and both are drawn by Matt Baker. (Yeah, i know her hair is brown on the first two covers, but she's a redhead inside)

Kate came 8 years after Sky Girl, in 1952, running for 3 issues in her own title. -

Like Ginger Maguire, Kate was set in a comedy series, and both shared similarities. But Kate wasn't a Fly Girl, as we can see in her first story...

Here's a couple more of Kate's adventures to give you a feel for the series -

art by Matt Baker for Canteen Kate #s 1-3 (1952)