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)

From Flying Saucers To Outer Space

Well, i get curious. I wanted to know more about UFO & Outer Space - the title that continued numbering from what we were looking at yesterday - UFO Flying Saucers. From a quick scan through the issues i dug up, it seems to have been primarily a reprint book using the stories of the previous title. But there were a couple of new features mixed in.

One was a continuation of their speculative pieces, the ever popular What If...? tales. Best of all, this first one is drawn by Vic Torry And His Flying Saucer's own Alden McWilliams -

Unfortunately, as is too often the case, we have no clue who drew this second one, nor the writers of either strip.

Folks attempting to identify the human abductees should keep in mind that this tale is from 1979.

The other new feature was an extension of their ongoing encounter reports, but this time using stories submitted by the readers as the basis for Reader's Reports. Once again, the creators on these comics are lost to time.

You know who else sees UFOs?

Cavemen...

page art from UFO & Outer Space #s 23 & 24 (1979)

3-Day Weekend Matinee: Day The Third

I've got too many exclamations points laying around unused. Time to unload some!

Welcome back to our 3-Day Weekend Matinee!
Three Thrilling Tales!!!
Our 3rd chapter of Oskar Lebeck & Alden McWilliams' classic Twin Earths!
The return of Joe Kubert's Son Of Sinbad!!
The concluding chapter of Bob Powell's Vic Torry And His Flying Saucer!!!
Oh, the excitement! (Most of which comes from finally managing to connect and post this to the queue. Weather warming up again, and net connection failing. Oh, the joys of living outside the city!)

Okay... I think we used up a fair bit of our surplus - On With The Show!

Twin Earths - Chapter 3:

Previously on Twin Earths: Vana, an agent from Terra, has revealed the existence of her world to government agents of the United States. Occupying the opposite position on the same orbital path as Earth, Terra is scientifically more advanced than Earth, and poses a great potential danger - if she can convince the men in charge...

To Be Continued...

If you missed it, we recently took a quick look at Son Of Sinbad from Joe Kubert back in 1950. Here's another tale from that lone volume -

And, now - the exciting conclusion of Vic Torry And His Flying Saucer!

While looking for background information, i found that not only has Vic Torry's tale been reprinted in recent years, but Atlantis put out a 5" model of his flying saucer!

Nice to see some of those old lost strips being remembered. If you're interested in the model, here's their web page for it.

Twin Earths by Oskar Lebeck and Alden McWilliams for United Features,   Son Of Sinbad by Joe Kubert for Son Of Sinbad #1, Vic Torry by Roy  Ald and Bob Powell for Vic Torry And His Flying Saucer #1 (1947, 1950, 1952)