Shadows From Beyond!

This is my new "grail" comic; the one I desire more than any other single book. I don't have a copy and I'd really like one. The cover by Ditko is a classic, filled with his Ditko geometry along with those offbeat little words that reinforce the weird effect of the whole image.


Shadows From Beyond #1 has an unusual pedigree, even by the typically wacky Charlton standards. Unusual Tales ended its run with issue #49. Charlton then decided to continue the numbering of the series (common for them and most publishers at the time) with a new title. But somehow they did it twice.


The next issue of Unusual Tales was indeed Shadows From Beyond #1 but it was also Blue Beetle #50. Both are regarded as derivatives of the cancelled comic. Sheesh!

Shadows From Beyond is desirable for another reason though. It marks the debut of Pat Boyette at Charlton, featuring him on several stories in this very first issue.


For the record the Ditko cover and the Boyette story it refers to were reprinted (minus the words) many years later toward the end of the Ghost Manor run.

So for all of those reasons, I'd love to get hold of a copy. The Old Gypsy calls!

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Return To Planet X!

I got hold of a DVD copy of the sci-fi classic The Man From Planet X. I've had this on VHS for several years and enjoyed it. Watching it again, I was struck by the atmosphere of the movie, the somber mood which enhances the mystery.

To be honest as a sci-fi movie it's limited. Apparently it's the first to trade in this stuff by a small margin, beating The Day the Earth Stood Still by a few months. It's nowhere near as good as that classic, but it's interesting in its own way.

Robert Clarke does the best acting job I've ever seen him do, and that might must be the result of some good direction from Edgar Ulmer, a quality talent relegated to B movies, but a director with real flair. Sadly Clarke is often directing himself and that doesn't seem to bring out the best in him.

William Schallert is on hand as the obligatory baddie, and he does a really top notch job. A face you've seen a thousand times, this time he's got an edge we don't associate with his good-neighbor mug.


Everyone else is adequate and keeps the story moving. But that's the problem. There's not really all that much story. A mysterious planet is heading for the Earth and an astronomer has made some intriguing deductions about it, so Robert Clarke as a reporter with some ties to the guy goes to Scotland to get the story. He meets the daughter who has grown up into a love interest and Schallert who is a down-on-his-luck guy with a bad rep and is helping the astronomer at his remote tower lab. The town folk are typically nervous about what is going on. A ship lands and quickly a little big-headed alien appears and the story unfolds. Whether the alien is a threat is seemingly solved.

It's a decent movie, with some outstanding images of remote landscapes. As a movie I give it a solid grade, but as a sci-fi flick I'd have to give deduct a few marks. The weakness is in the alien design. The alien is never more effective than he is in the movie poster. He looks weird, but that's about it. He doesn't speak and he doesn't really do anything all that overtly interesting, save walk around. It's great to look at, but it doesn't come to much as the film unfolds. He seems frankly disinterested in humans and certainly doesn't seem intrigued by heaving bosoms as the poster suggests.


On an ironic note, the comic book adaptation from Fawcett is getting reprinted along with several other vintage movie comics. See this link for details.

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Wayne's Worlds!

Wayne Howard is one of those eccentric talents who tapped into something special. An acolyte of Wally Wood, there's no denying Howard's debt to the work of Wood. He was an assistant to the great man himself for a time. But then he went and took that Woodesque approach and carved out his own niche.

At Charlton he found a place he could thrive. His earliest work has a really full-bodied character to it. In later years his work became a bit flatter in its way, losing some of the vitality of the early days. But he never lost the charm that infused his characters. They always had distinct qualities that enlivened them.

Howard found some small success as an inker for the Big Two, but his work is mostly found at Charlton where he even created his own title Midnight Tales. For eighteen glorious issues he oversaw a ghostly book like few others. Talents like Joe Staton and Don Newton contributed regularly and along with Howard gave this book its own distinctive flavor.


Wayne Howard passed away a few years ago, too young. He'd left comics behind and avoided talking about them. But those of us who are his fans will never forget them.

Above is a gallery of some of Howard's finest Charlton covers. Here's a link to the Golden Age Comic Book Stories Blog where Mr.Door Tree presents some of those great stories.

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Space Giants!

These two covers, published several months apart really are similar in layout design. And both have stammering dialogue! A giant Cat-Man in space, who could possibly not want to read that story?

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The Tyro Team!

I've already presented Pat Boyette's Spookman and Grass Green's The Shape from the debut issue of Charlton Premiere, so let me round out that with Steve Skeates' The Tyro Team. The artwork on this feature is the reliable team of Bill Montes and Ernie Bache. Below you'll find a text piece from the issue discussing the way these stories came to be gathered together under one cover. And now let the story begin. That was fun. Rip Off

Killer Eyes!

The eyes of this alien from Charlton's Space War always make me think of those alien baddies from Killers From Space. That cold, round, bug-eyed stare seems very similar to me. It's another great cover by the painfully underrated Rocke Mastroserio.



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A Date With Dracula!

Dracula walking around carrying a helpless and unconscious beautiful victim is a classic pose. It derives from the Lugosi movie itself even, if not sooner.


Marvel used it a lot as evidenced by the gallery below.








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