Daily Archives: August 19, 2005

Weird Wonder Tales #6 [1974]

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A 7-page Kirby/Ayers reprint from STRANGE TALES #100 (1962) in this story, featuring a failing amusement park owner who designs an impossible to solve maze in order to prop up his business. There are some neat little visual bits in the designs inside the maze, although really, they’d have been pretty expensive to build for a failing amusement park. Trap doors, upsidedown rooms, optical illusions. The door giving off an electrical shock would also seem to be a health code violation.

Weird Wonder Tales #6 [1974]

Eventually he kills a reporter who threatens to expose him, and then confronts the owner of a rival maze (were mazes really all the rage back in the 1960s?), who turns out to be…

Well, the story (in both the original and reprint) say the rival is “Fate”, but some of the lettering and art on the last page looks to be changed, so I think it was originally supposed to be something more demonic, maybe “Satan”, and changed at the last minute.

Visually a very fun story, especially the weird maze on the first page and all the weird perspective bits inside the maze.

Published 1974

Star Spangled Comics #37 [1944] – Cover

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I really like this example of the wartime S&K covers. As with many of the Newsboy Legion covers, the focus was on the effort of people on the home front in aiding the war effort (while the Boy Commandos covers featured that team on the various front lines), and it comes across nicely on this one, without being overbearing, and some nice rendering on the machinery.

StarSpangledComics37_457.jpg

Published 1944