Planet Comics

[Melia Hazinski]

PlanetComics was a science fiction comic book title published by Fiction House from January 1940 to Winter 1953. It was the first comic book dedicated wholly to science fiction.[1] Like most of Fiction House's early comics titles, Planet Comics was a spinoff of a pulp magazine, in this case Planet Stories. Like the magazine before it, Planet Comics features space operatic tales of muscular, heroic space adventurers who are quick with their "ray pistols" and always running into gorgeous women who need rescuing from bug-eyed space aliens or fiendish interstellar bad guys.

Sometimes, though, Planet Comics reversed this formula: both covers and stories occasionally provided heroines who handily defeated the space aliens and interplanetary villains with little or no assistance from males (the comic was also seen as a fantasy title). Cynics might have noted that this sex-equality strategy in effect simply multiplied the number of lovely girls shown per panel, and insured that each and every panel featured at least one smashing spacegirl.

The Flint Baker/Space Ranger stories, according to Raymond Miller, "featured such writers as Al Schmidt and Huxley Haldane."[3] Jerry Bails and Hames Ware's Who's Who of American Comic Books mentions Herman Bolstein and Dick Briefer.[4]

The strong female heroines of Planet Comics were complemented by Fiction House's employing several female artists to work on such tales, particularly Lily Rene, Marcia Snyder, Ruth Atkinson, and Fran(ces) Hopper (ne Dietrick), whose art for "Mysta of the Moon" was often stunning. In addition, many artists who would become well-known names worked on Planet Comics stories over its 13-year history. These included the likes of Murphy Anderson, Matt Baker, Nick Cardy, Joe Doolin, Graham Ingels, George Evans, Ruben Moreira, John Cullen Murphy, George Tuska, and Maurice Whitman.

While young male readers were no doubt attracted to the pin-up quality of Planet Comics's artwork, letters from readers printed in the comic demonstrate that its readership also included girls, who were perhaps drawn to the array of competent and capable space heroines (Benton 1991, p. 31).

Planet Comics was considered by noted fan Raymond Miller to be "perhaps the best of the Fiction House group," as well as "most collected and most valued."[3] In Miller's opinion, it "wasn't really featuring good art or stories... in the first dozen or so issues," not gaining most of "its better known characters" until "about the 10th issue." "Only 3 of [its] long running strips started with the first issue... Flint Baker, Auro - Lord of Jupiter, and the Red Comet."[3]

Other less notable short-lived strips included "Quorak, Super Pirate", "Amazona the Mighty Woman", "Tiger Hart" (whose one adventure was drawn by Fletcher Hanks using the pseudonym "Carlson Merrick"), "Space Admiral Curry", and "Planet Payson".[2]

My father works for the State Department. After I was born we moved to Jerusalem when I was age 3 or so, where we went over the house of some of my parents' friends, Namaan and Helen Assad. They loved kids but didn't have any of their own. They let me look through Tintin and the Secret of the Unicorn. I couldn't read yet, but I pored over the colorful pages. Then when we left, they let me take it home with them. Ever since I've been into comics, including several I couldn't read the language of, with my patient parents driving me and my brother around to every comic book store each summer. I eventually ended up back in Washington DC, where Big Planet Comics had opened nearby since I lived there before. With the Small Press Expo (SPX) started up locally by some of the Big Planet Comics crew, my fate was sealed. After becoming part owner of three of the Big Planet Comics stores, I started co-publishing comics with Box Brown for his Retrofit Comics in 2013.

Jared Smith: I started in the retail side of comics twice. The first time, after I had graduated from college, in 1999 I started up an online site for selling comics called Mars Import. The inspiration for the name was the "All-American Steel" sort of idea, a very generic bland name, but in this case, it was if you were on Mars, what comics would you import? Everything good, of course! A lot of people took it to mean we were importing comics from Mars, and that worked for me too. At that time Amazon and ebay were still pretty small and there was a huge split among the comics scenes, at least to me. So I got an account to carry comics distributed through Diamond, but I also had some people approach me about carrying small press, and I approached a few people I really liked myself. My "everything good" perspective was global though. I took a trip to Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Angouleme in France and Barcelona in Spain and saw a ton of great Dutch and French and Spanish comics that should have been available in English, or at least in America just for the art. I was able to order direct from some publishers and distributors over there. I even imported books from a cool French government program that exports French books (The Center for Exporting French Books). France has a cap on how much you discount a book, which I think is something all culturally proud countries should do. In this case though I only got a 15% discount or something on it, and they only shipped air freight, so I'd get a ton of very expensive books I'd have to mark up to sell. But the audience for that sort of book in America was eager for it. There just aren't a lot of them. Plus the really great books would get translated eventually, but there are so many that still haven't. Sadly my language skills weren't good enough to keep that up, but I still think it's a good idea. Same for Japan too, but I speak/read zero Japanese, so I never tried that.

The second time was in 2001. I was complaining as usual at my local comic book store, Big Planet Comics, about my boring job doing very basic layout on technical manuals for telecommunications equipment training courses. The owner of the store, Greg Bennett, said, "Well we're opening a new store in Georgetown, do you want to be the manager?" I said yes of course! Georgetown is the original port city on the Potomac River that was incorporated into the town plan for the new capital, Washington DC. So it's one of the oldest parts of the city, [with] lots of small streets and even some cobblestones, with the river and the C&O Canal. Lots of foreigners live there, due to the cool neighborhood and expensive schools of Georgetown and George Mason University. The best part was I got to live in the apartment above the store. The store itself used to be a bookstore, so we just moved right in with the built-in bookshelves on every floor (including the parts I lived in). It was heaven. Cozy, full of weird nooks we had to work around, but heaven. Then in 2004 Greg was looking to retire, so I bought him out of the store in Vienna, Virginia that I had used to shop at, and moved over there, leaving the Georgetown one behind for now. Eventually I would buy that one too and go in with another partner, Peter Casazza, who had been the manager of the Georgetown store and the original location in Bethesda, Maryland. We bought a friendly competitor Liberty Books and Comics (nee Closet of Comics) in College Park, Maryland.

The graphic novel boom I'd say. Back when we started you could practically shelve every good graphic novel or trade paperback (slang term for a spined collection of individual comic books). Nowadays there isn't enough room to do that. Or time to read them all. The game has really changed, [and] just reading weekly comic book releases doesn't keep you up with the market enough. A ton of comic book stores closed over the last year, partly due to terrible offerings from the large mainstream weekly comic book publishers (DC and Marvel usually), and I think a lot of stores just couldn't adjust to that fast enough, or didn't want. We're trying to!

Digital innovations lead a huge panic too. "Are comic book stores going away? Ah the sky is falling!" Most book publishers/readers/stores worried about it too. I think we had an advantage over most books at first, since most ways of reading a comic were hard to translate to digital, and even if you did, it was usually at a smaller size that you were used to. Plus the tactile experience of reading a comic, and going to a comic shop, are still more important to comic fans than book fans. That's changing too, though, with some huge digital deals from publishers that just don't make it cost-conscious to buy in print. Plus the size problem, if you have 1000 comic books in a stack of storage boxes in your attic, or all of them on a computer. So tying back to the first one, we've seen the evolution of weekly readers coming in once or twice a year to pick up the trade paperbacks of their favorite series instead of trying to keep up with every chapter.

I lied, I have a third one. The diversity of readers and creators and even characters (in the white-straight-male dominated mainstream) has been impressive and really heartening. The boys' club of old awful comic shops has always been something Big Planet Comics tried to fight against, welcoming everyone and modeling ourselves as bookstores that sold comic books. "The comic book stores for readers" is our motto, and preventing speculators from trying to buy 100 copies of some terrible "hot" comic was another thing we did, which is why Big Planet survived the big comic book crash of the '90s (before my time, but still an ethos I agree with). But nowadays there will be times when our stores are full of women and minorities and just a wide variety of customers. The growth of Young Adult and kids graphic novels (not many comics, but lots of graphic novels) has also probably saved the format. It seems like a whole generation got skipped after the '90s crash, but the new readers are making up for it.

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