Nothing Left To Chance

Saturday Leftover Day.

Here's a weird series that would really deserve a nice representation in book form. Closer Than We Think ran in the late fifties and early sixties. It was a product of it's time, when the interest in science and the future reached a new high in the wake of the launch of the Russian satelite Sputnik in late 1957. Many comic strips and newspaper strips featuring 'science heroes' were started. Unlike the juvenile science fiction boom of the early fifties, these stories were all more grounded, many set only 'a few years' into the future. Jck Kirby's Sky Masters is an pretty well known example, but there als was a strip called Drift Marlo and Jerry Robinson's Jet Scott can be seen as a precursor. There also were a couple of sciency factual panel strips, such as Our Space Age by Otto Binder and Our New Age by Athelstan Spilhaus. Closer Than We Think was done by commercial illustrator Arthur Radenbaugh. In it, he illustrated real life innovations that were being worked on rigth at that moment and could become part of our households very soon. For his information he often quoted scientists and people higher up in the gernment or the military. All very impressive. But what makes this Sunday only series, which ran for five years, so special is that in all of my years of collecting them (and I have quite a few) I never came across even one 'invention' that actually was made! Part of that could be because of his fancifull science fiction influenced way of illustration these futuristic images, but mostly the inventions themselves are silly at best usually unnessecary. With 200/300 samples to choose from, I think a great book could be made of the weirdest of them. And maybe this time around, he could even influence some artists or designers with them, because as poplar as this strip was, it never seems to have been used as reference material by any movie, comic book or television designers.

As I said, I have quite a few of these strips, but most of them are from a paper where have about five or six interesting things to scan in every paper, making it all move forward very slowly. Consider this a first sample. A fuller representation may be... closer than we think! There is a short article about Radenbaugh and this strip online by the way. Maybe a bt too respectful - from this piece you get the impression his innovations were actually acurate sometimes. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Before-the-Jetsons-Arthur-Radebaugh-Illustrated-the-Future.html

Science Faction

Wednesday Special Features Day.

After Showing the odd New! feature by Gene Fawcette this week, I went back to find more of his Our New Age feature. Or at least, the feature was written by famous astronomist Athelstan Spilhaus and drawn by Fawcette from 1962 to at least 1971, well into the run of New! I also found evidence of a daily version of Our New Age drwn by Fawcette, although I have not yet found when that appeared precisely. While I am still gathering those clips, I will share another similar feature I wanted to use against Our New Age. Around the first time Our New Age appeared, there also was a daily feature called Our Space Age, written by famous comics and science fiction writer Otto Binder. The name of the first artist escapes me, but later on it was taken over by carl Pfeufer, who has his own history with comics. Pfeufer was one of the most important first replacement artists of Timely's The Submariner and drew The Bantam Prince, the third incarnation of an adventure comic strip in the late forties and early fifties. It is one of those strips I have a lot of clips from, but no complete continuity yet, so I am waiting to cellect that before presenting it to you. Anyway, here Pfeufer has his own Wikipedia page, which makes for interesting reading. It mentions that he worked on Our Space Age from 1960 to 1969, so maybe he was the first artist on it after all. Anyway, here are some of those exciting science fictional science facts.