Blast Off!

I got distracted from writing scienfornication stories while doing research, which unfortunately happens more than it should. First was the Lensman series which was a little more "ehh" than I expected, then I found the first seven Tom Corbett juvenile novels on Gutenberg (and bought some originals on eBay). From there I slipped into watching the Rocky Jones series on YouTube, listening to the Tom Corbett radio show and digging up what little there is of the kinescoped TV series. Once I'm done with the last of those there's the Space Patrol TV and radio series to suck away what little of my porn-writing brain is left.

Dammit. But I have gotten some more goofy 1950s space slang and outlined two more plots. I just need to sit down and write the goddamn things.

I got way more into this show than I expected and I think listening to the radio show at work while the boss was out is what did it. Nobody at work wants to hear the inappropriate organ music so it's been a furtive, secretive exercise.

See, this is how all old-timey radio was done, back in the day.

The TV series was shuffled around all four networks from 1950-55, the radio show (using the same actors) was on for the first half of 1952 and the books were originally published from 1952-56. There was also a comic strip and comic book series I'm not even going near since I have enough goddamn magazines around here already.

The Tom Corbett book series made the characters a little more gee-whiz boy genius cadets than the vaguely 30-ish adults on the TV show. They've made Tom Corbett a super-duper spaceship commander-in-training, Venusian Astro (a colonial rather than an alien) can rebuild any rocket engine blindfolded and they've filed the points off jerk-with-a-heart-of-jerk Roger Manning making him more of a sarcastic Eddie Haskell who's a whiz at astronavigation.

I'm just pretending the guys on TV are the same ones in the books but a few years later--a little crankier, slacker and more likely to paste somebody.

"Aren't you men a little old to be cadets?" Really, how many years did these guys get left back anyway?

Seems the Solar Guard doesn't pay very well since it looks like Commander Arkwright has to sell shoes on the side.

But I guess somebody has to pay for that rocketship the cadets shot with a torpedo.

Twice.

"He did it."

What color do you think these spacesuits are? For some reason I was picturing a gross yellowish beige, like an old rubber glove.

Nope, a gross shade of pink. I guess they were out of yellowish beige.
TV and Radio Mirror October 1952.

And since I like to find a little what-the-fuckery in every old magazine I buy, here's some boxing kitties.

F-N Ads

No humiliating laxative ads in Startling Stories Fall 1946 to clear the palate after that cringe-worthy Captain Future novel but there are a few things to poke around at.

I noticed they left off the more popular choices of "cry like a baby," "be eaten by badgers" and "die of exposure ten minutes' walk from a ranger station."

Don't yachts automatically negate any personality flaws? Otherwise total douches who own yachts would never be able to fill them with half dressed barely legal bikini models.

Again with the F-N test. Apparently Wildroot Cream Oil turns a fun guy with messy hair into a stodgy Sunday school teacher. Here's a fun thing to do; try to guess which guy gets laid first.

Ugh.

I've been putting off dealing with this particular awful, awful Captain Future and distracting myself with Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet (book, TV and radio shows) plus publishing a few non-erotica needlework patterns. I could've skipped it altogether but I've got a couple too many zingers aimed right at its black little heart.

The Solar Invasion, Startling Stories Fall 1946. This is the only one written by Manly Wade Wellman who although he's a pretty good writer otherwise he didn't really have much of a grasp of the Captain Future character. It looked as though he'd read The Magician of Mars and maybe the first Cap Future novel (or an early style sheet) where Curt was an unbearable  two-dimensional swashbuckling douche, poured himself a couple bourbons, sat down at his typewriter and just rolled with it.

The plot doesn't matter in this colossal mountain of suck, at least not to me. Inter-dimensional aliens kind of led by Ul Quorn steal the Moon and, I dunno, turn it into a jungle. I don't remember why, only that Ul Quorn was wasted as a character and sort of drops into the background while these aliens shove the Moon into their dimension like they collect moons or they lost theirs in a poker game or something. Maybe they want the monopoly on moons.

This annoys Captain Future because that's where all his cool Moon stuff is so he goes running to the System President. For some reason President Carthew has either been reanimated after having his skull crushed in by evil mine owner out to get the monopoly on radium (Outlaws of the Moon) or the story takes place in an earlier time, back when Curt was a jerky, muscle-bound vigilante scientist bent on strong-arming some kind of peace in the solar system. Curt doesn't run into his office and scream that Carthew should be dead because he saw his brains splattered all over the rug so I guess it's Option 2.

Here's that muscle-bound douche on the 1960s paperback reprint of The Solar Invasion, as envisioned by Frank Frazetta. Fun fact: I hate Frank Frazetta.

Ugh. That isn't the Man of Tomorrow promised by Captain Future magazine; that's the guy who'd give the Man of Tomorrow an atomic wedgie and shove his head down the toilet. Edmond Hamilton had stopped describing Curt as "big" and had switched to "rangy" by the third novel making him more a space cowboy than some weirdo who got super-strength by wrestling robots.

Maybe Joan should start dressing like a robot. What with all the spanking and wrestling Grag has gotten way more action with Curt than his own almost girlfriend.

Ahhh, can it, ya big jerkass.

Simon also seems to be inexplicably impressed by pretty girls, something he's never done before. If he liked any humans other than Curt Newton he would have had his brain stuck in another body instead of a transparent box. His whole reason for that was so he wouldn't have to deal with some stupid body wasting energy he could be using to think about science stuff.

Stop lying, Simon. Women just annoy you. You only tolerate Joan because Curt almost sort of maybe likes her.

Ha-ha! Caught you in your web of lies, you brainy bastard!

Here's Curt stuck with Joan and N'rala on the jungle-ized Moon and not looking happy about it. He's probably annoyed that Frank Frazetta is hiding in the bushes painting this very scene and making a complete crapfest of it.

N'rala isn't written at all well, definitely not the sexy pistol-packin' femme fatale from The Seven Space Stones. She's even described as Ul Quorn's slave which tells me Wellman didn't read Space Stones otherwise he would've seen she was an opportunist who was happy to screw around with Ul Quorn so long as he had some sort of power. The first chance she got she was rubbing up against Captain Future as Plan B in case Ul Quorn failed in his little project to take over the solar system. Really, she's no fun at all in this novel and even more wasted than Ul Quorn.

Mondo gripe-a-roony: Otho's pet meteor mimic Oog--instead of randomly turning into whatever is around for camouflage or things that Otho or Curt think really hard about, he thinks about what he could turn into. He also shifts into smaller versions of people, which he's never done. The first scene in the story he's a tiny Joan for no fucking reason, and later when he's abandoned somewhere I don't care about he turns into a tiny Otho to take a bad guy's atom pistol out of the holster, then he climbs into the holster and mimics the pistol so he can get a ride on the guy's spaceship. All he's ever done in the previous novels is waddle around like a fucking Shmoo and randomly turn into stuff. Once Otho was being held prisoner and thought really hard about an atomic bomb to convince Oog to turn into one. Otho then used him to threaten the guards--until he thought of calling Grag a tin can and Oog suddenly became a tin can.

I'm pretty sure I forgot something in the weeks since I read this thing. Whatever. It's done. My brain hurts.

Fun With Ads

I've got a couple early Captain Futures lying around from before I was doing plot synopses but I believe right now I'll just goof off with the ads rather than bother with any detailed articles.

Captain Future, Spring 1940, Calling Captain Future. Cover has Curt having a First Time Tentacles moment with a star man while shooting his proton pistol at another star man. He and Joan accidentally woke these things up from suspended animation where they'd been for maybe hundreds of years while their ship was stuck in the Sargasso Sea of Space with piles of other wreckage. He'll meet these star men one more time in Star Trail to Glory when he gets stuck in the Sargasso Sea again.

Edit: I literally just now noticed the star men were stark raving nekkid.

I'm a little disappointed in the back cover. There really should be a crusty life-sized foot or a huge diagram on how trusses work instead of an ad for Shakespeare's plays. This was only the second issue of Captain Future magazine so I guess they hadn't gotten the swing of things yet.

As though feeling my disappointment they do manage a cringe-worthy Ex-Lax ad. The younger guy is totally bragging that Ex-Lax isn't anywhere near powerful enough for his big, manly bowels. "I need a laxative with a wallop," he tells Jim with pride. Later, he thrills the office with his toilet-clogging abilities.

To make things more fun, here's an exciting Eveready battery ad. Besides this sinister baby-eating lake, others I've seen have had car accidents in the dark, guys lost in the deep woods and Nazi spies who need to signal planes from a mountain top.

I might have made one of those up.

Captain Future, Fall 1940, The Triumph of Captain Future. This story has a bad guy called the Lifelord who sells an overpriced elixir that brings youth so long as you keep taking the stuff, and some other things happen that I can't be bothered to look up. We're just here for the ads so move along.

Jackpot! A full page false teeth by mail ad! It's also almost the same ad found in Quest Beyond the Stars but in a disturbing duotone. This ad was what decided me on getting this particular magazine.

To further confuse the issue of just who the audience was for a magazine that is usually described as juvenile, here's some old guy trying to convince other old guys to sign up to push some sort of uber-special veeblefetzer without telling what it is or how you're supposed to sell it. He was so vague about it I was almost convinced it was a Rosicrucians ad.

Next up: That hateful Captain Future, The Solar Invasion, which sucked so hard I'm having trouble even getting to where I can make fun of it. I'm pretty certain the story gave me mild brain damage and the sheer awfulness of the illustrations made me weep for humanity. The back cover has a goddamn battery ad with some lame guy getting lost in the woods in the most boring way possible and I'm not holding out hope for an amusing laxative ad inside.

Wardrobe Change

For anyone that cares, I was digging around on eBay recently and found a Bergey cover I knew I had but it looked odd so I went to my collection to see why.

The one on the left was a magazine I'd had for a while, Fantastic Story summer 1950, the right was the recent eBay find, Thrilling Wonder Stories winter 1946. This means the story the cover is illustrating is in the older mag so I can find out if the guy is yanking the wires apart or jamming them together.

Note also the smaller size of the paper-rationed 1940s issue as compared to the newer publication. My wartime and post-war Startling Stories pulps have the same size change as well as lower page counts. They compensated by using smaller print so the amount of stuff in each issue wasn't much changed but there were fewer issues per year.

Startling Stories would start out as a bi-monthly magazine (1939-42), switch to quarterly from 1943-45, go back to a bi-monthly (1946-51), before attempting to go to a monthly starting in 1952. They had switched to a digest-sized magazine in mid-1952. By the end of 1953 (pulps were dropping like flies) they switched back to a quarterly before ceasing publication in the winter of 1955.

Random fact: According to Edmond Hamilton, the only reason Captain Future magazine was missing the Fall 1944 issue wasn't because of wartime paper shortages. He'd gone to Mexico for a few months and wrote Magic Moon and the "Worlds of Tomorrow" story about one of the handful of planets the plot took place in and when he tried to go through customs they confiscated all his manuscripts and sent them to Washington, all because there was a map of where the novel took place. Apparently they really needed to get cracking on that Nazi base on Neptune. Since it would be months before he got his manuscript back and he didn't have time to write another novel they just skipped that one and printed Magic Moon in the Winter 1944 issue.

Anyway, I had no idea Earle Bergey recycled his covers, but since he'd done literally hundreds of covers in his career there's no way I could ever see all of them. Maybe the brass bras and miniskirts of the 1940s were completely out of fashion by the 1950s and no self-respecting space woman would be caught dead in an asteroid storm wearing a getup like this. Really, her outfit is the only thing changed on the entire cover.

Note to self: In scienfornication stories without characters in Space Brigade uniforms I need to put somebody in a damn brass bra. What the hell's wrong with me?

Bergey died in late 1952 so Startling's covers went from fun and goofy with brass bras, thrusting nipples and plenty of BEMs (Bug Eyed Monsters), to staid and realistic. Sort of like what was being published in SF at the time.

Kind of like this. Startling Stories, May 1953. I totally bought this one for the cover. In the future they appear to have solved the impracticality of strapless bras in spacesuits but not guys sneaking a look while they ostensibly "help" you in or out of your unwieldy gear. I'm pretty sure he signed up for astronaut school because of what happens to boobs in low gravity.

Here's the response to a reader who complained the cover of Startling Stories January 1950 had nothing to do with the story "The Return of Captain Future." It did, sort of. Grag holds Joan back for all of one sentence. Anyhow, it mentions both brass bras and BEMs in one crap verse.

No, I haven't got this issue and unless I look for dealers who don't sell on eBay I most likely will only be able to afford it if it has no cover and half the pages have been eaten by beetles. I didn't even think this was Joan Randall since her hair is the wrong color. I was all ready to say she was some dangerously nipply space queen. You also have to remember Grag is supposed to be seven feet tall and the cover shows Joan to be a stilt-legged Amazon who'd probably tower over him by a good three feet.

Yeah, anyway, I've got two more Capt. Future stories to ruin before I get to this one so I'll leave it hanging like a damp, abandoned wino's overcoat on a park bench.

Brass bras just naturally segue into the cover of the next Captain Future novel, Outlaw World, Startling Stories winter 1946. Another Bergey brass-bra and miniskirt cover. If you're wondering, yes, her bra is attached to her helmet which means there was always the chance of Captain Future getting an eyeful when Joan ditches that oddly-positioned bubble helmet so she can actually face forward. This cover scene does take place in the novel. They escape from bad guy Ru Ghur's space ship and rocket away using hand-held impellers.

Ru Ghur is an evil scientist who has invented a "lethe ray" that people use to have hyper-realistic dreams they become addicted to and Curt discovers his base on the planet Vulcan.

Remember Vulcan, it'll become important in the story "Children of the Sun." It's an unexplored planet closest to the Sun that nobody bothers with since you need a ship with special shielding to get anywhere near it and everyone thinks it's covered in molten lava. Vulcan is hollow, Curt finds the way in and blah blah blah discovers the natives speak the same root language most of the primitive natives he's encountered do, since they all had the same origins mentioned in earlier stories and that he goes looking for in "The Return of Captain Future."

I'll leave the rest of the story but here's an amusing passage early on when Curt is captured by Ru Ghur and connected up to the lethe ray. His dream involves that house with the garden he half-assedly promised Joan, like, years ago and it all goes depressingly pear-shaped, at least for poor Joan, when we find out he's also brought along the Futuremen to live with them. So Joan's finally alone with the man of her dreams but he's brought along his entire family. Sorry, Joan. 

Unfortunately we don't get to see what Joan dreams when she's connected to this machine but I'm guessing whatever it was it wasn't cluttered up by a pack of Futuremen.

To make things so much worse, Otho disguises himself as Joan while she's still drugged by the lethe ray and Curt doesn't realize it isn't her. It isn't spelled out that Otho is wearing her clothes but just wearing a brown wig isn't going to do it. Otho and Curt both have a habit of knocking someone out, changing their appearance with makeup, then swiping the unconscious person's clothes to complete the disguise. Curt has also taken a dead guy's clothes, ew. So Otho seems to have gotten further with Joan than Curt has. Damn.

Nearly forgot, for some reason Hamilton keeps pushing "ten years ago" in this story. Ten years ago Curt invented the vibration-drive that he used in Quest Beyond the Stars (Winter 1942), ten years ago he did blabbity blah blah. It was mentioned enough times that I believe he wanted to age the character a bit, since he'd become less the two-dimensional swashbuckling douche from the first novel who comes bounding in through President Carthew's window like some obnoxious hennaed Errol Flynn, punching bad guys in the name of science. 

Science! 

Hey, another edit: I also forgot to mention Outlaw World recycled the asteroid belt pirates from The Three Planeteers, though I liked them better in the earlier novel but I can't really recall why. Brigands of the Moon sucked away much of the memory of this Cap Future before I could properly write about it. Dammit.

There would be only one more novel before Captain Future was put on hiatus for a couple of years. After that, the stories got a little depressing. Those are short, like 20 pages each so it'll be easier just to do them all in one big chunk, as though they're part of a disjointed novel.

Next time: The worst Captain Future novel ever!

It's Alive!

 



Brigands of the Moon, the Secret Confessions of Gregg Haljan is now live on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Mutiny and brigandage stalk the Space-ship Planetara as she speeds to the Moon to pick up a fabulously rich cache of radium-ore! But while danger looms, the passengers and crew are found with their pants down—literally. Brigands of the Moon, the Secret Confessions of Gregg Haljan purports to be the true story of what really went on behinds the scenes of this notorious mutiny, in the words of the Planetara's third officer.

“I'll introduce myself. My name, Gregg Haljan. My age, twenty-five years. My original narrative of the mutiny and brigandage of the Planetara, the one suitable for family viewing, was broadcast with a fair success but my publishers have suggested that I record the true story, the one more suited for late-night reading with a scantily-clad friend of your choosing––the secret confessions whose sordid details have been scrawled upon washroom walls, whispered by naughty schoolboys, and whose scenes have been recreated, photographed and sold by enterprising salesmen of the back alley sort. It is my wish that these confessions be told properly and any erroneous details corrected––especially those concerning length and girth.” 

Brigands Be Done

I am officially done with all 62,000 words and something like 250 pages of my porny re-write of Brigands of the Moon. It's been uploaded and it should go live tomorrow.

Those last five chapters with the lamest battles ever were the worst to porn up but I think after hacking out 9/10ths of the original battle scenes and adding in my own crap I've solved the problem. I had fully intended on finishing it and uploading it last weekend but it was like 150 degrees and the last thing I wanted to do in that kind of heat was to write about nekkid sweaty people touching each other. Ew.

The cover has been slightly re-done, mostly just shifting the title around to balance it out a little better. I searched for a better image but most old science fiction pulp covers don't have much in the way of couples maybe almost making out so it was either stay with the weird giant nekkid space people or have a straight adventure cover. I'd rewritten it from straight adventure (with an awkward, sappy romance) to smut so I needed the cover to reflect that. I guess.

Here's my original from way back when it was meant to be a serial. No difference in the images but the new cover isn't all bottom-heavy like this one. The yellow titles visually weigh it down--I could've probably gotten away with the main title on the new cover being yellow since it was moved to the top, but I was too lazy to look up how to make outline block text in GIMP.

So there.

Back to writing Racy Rocket Adventures. I've got some Space Marines and the Moon Pope sitting around all impatient for something to do. Hope I can remember what it was I had planned for them.

Woops.

I also fixed the table of contents for the Spicy Science Stories Collection. For some reason the link to "Some Ill Planet Reigns" linked to "Too much to Handle" instead, which wasn't the worst mistake I could have made but it was way too stupid to leave in

Coming up: Two more Captain Futures and another crapload of wtf.

Brigands Be Damned

I had planned on finishing up the exhausting Brigands of the Moon this afternoon but it kicked my ass and I wound up building a lap desk instead. My laptop fan is now steadily blowing varnish fumes at me and I can taste colors, so there's that.

The main roadblock I had to blast through vis-à-vis Brigands was the last chunk of the original. When you have something like 30 pages (five chapters) of just battles, and not even exciting battles, it's nearly impossible to find places to jam in sex scenes, especially when I don't care anymore.

What I meant to say was, especially when all the characters are on the Moon wearing pressurized space suits. I think I finally figured out how to correct the lame battle dilemma by having the battles go on in the background while the hero is busy and a mite oblivious to them. Maneuvering him and his lady friend indoors and making it so they're not needed for battling Martian radium-thieves was the last monolithic obstacle I had to tip over but by the time I'd done that I had no brain cells left to tie up the loose ends. Well, that and the varnish fumes.

I did comedically crash a space ship into the Moon, though. 

The crux of the nub of the thing is I'm sick of these fucking Martian brigands though I am impressed the author completely refused to call them pirates despite their leader wearing a big stupid plumed hat and tall boots. Very un-Martian I thought.

Plumes, for fuck's sake. At least he didn't have a parrot.

I made a valiant stab at E.E. Smith's Triplanetary and got really annoyed by it, though now I'm seeing a lot of commentary from longtime fans that both Triplanetary and First Lensman should be read last or perhaps not at all since Triplanetary was a standalone story from the 30s that had some stuff added to it when it was republished in 1948 to make it a prequel to the Lensmen series. First Lensman was written in 1950 to bridge Triplanetary and Galactic Patrol.

Note: I found the two-volume Science Fiction Book Club hardback editions of the whole Lensman series on Amazon dirt cheap, less than a couple bucks per volume. Some eBay sellers seem to think these are worth 50 bucks. Ha.

So, I'll be starting on Galactic Patrol tomorrow on the damn bus on the way to my stupid job but since it had a huge influence on Babylon 5 it'll make me way happier than that first half of Triplanetary did. Coincidentally, I've been threatening to rewatch Babylon 5 from the beginning (again) but I still have a couple seasons of Lexx sitting on my coffee table mocking me. And yeah, I could've long since watched Lexx already but Brigands of the Moon has moved into my apartment and is eating all my food and not paying rent, much like a sucky unemployed boyfriend.

Better Tasting and Good For You

Spicy Science Stories Collection is now live as are the new covers on all the old titles, or at least they'd better be. The stories in the collection are the same as the previously-published shorts but with the formatting cleaned up and a shmancy cover.

Now back to the soul-sucking nightmare that is Brigands of the Moon which is looking like it'll be about 250 Kindle pages when it's all said and done, about a third of which is my own input. The next time I think I want to porn up a public domain novel the original had better only be about 40 pages total, goddammit.

EDIT: While procrastinating on Brigands I made this NOOK button thingy for my book list.

Hacked Apart

Nearly done crapping up Brigands of the Moon. I've got a couple more chapters, then I can make a new cover and hopefully I'll be done with it this weekend so I can get back to the Space Marines and their strange quest for the missing Moon Pope.

The worst of Brigands was whittling things down to a more manageable size, things like distilling a three-page fight scene down to a half a page and completely taking out the same exact goddamn fight scene but told from a different person's perspective and at least two pages longer. I'm all like, fuck that shit, I can't make this funny twice. I'm having a hard enough time making it funny one time.

If I've learned anything from this exercise it's how to pork up a decent 30-page story to make a snoozy four-part epic. Jiminy fucking crickets.

Just uploaded the Spicy Science Stories Collection, complete with a fancy new cover design which then made all the rest of the Spicy Science Stories look like ass what with their lame pixilated bullshit fonts and everything.

I'm thinking of doing a print version of this one using Amazon's CreateSpace but I haven't bothered to click on the link to see the specs yet. I want altered illustrations and fake ads and a fancy table of contents. We'll see. 

Here's the inspiration for the design. Of course it's a magazine series I don't have any issues of. I've been too lazy to look for that one on eBay but I'm kind of intrigued by a 720 page magazine. That's closer to a Sears catalog than a pulp mag. Obviously paper shortages weren't yet in effect in 1943.

Just for shiggles, here's one super crappy old cover and the new version whose floating doodads and such could use some tweaking but I'm going to say it's done. I have no idea what's up with the title banner for the one on the left. I think I liked the Startling Stories font for about a week, then persisted in using it to keep the covers consistent even though I hated its stinking guts by then. Really, it was like I thought I wasn't allowed to change a goddamn cover midway through a series.

The older ones were done in a lame graphics program on a very old Windows laptop since I hadn't figured out how to load my three bazillion fonts in Linux at the time. Really, what's the point of having cool fonts if you can't use them? Once I found out how to do that the new covers were easily fixed up in GIMP, which I should've been using in the first place since the old graphics program had some serious issues with scaling a pasted image like the title and making it look bad.

The Spicy Science Stories series all looks like this now, or it will once all the new uploaded covers go live, and since some covers only had one version saved the conversion was a little clumsy. Others I still had the image saved one step before I started throwing up text all over it.

My new blog banner was also done in GIMP one afternoon a couple weeks ago when I was pretending to work on Brigands of the Moon. For some reason it blurs a little in the mobile version of the blog, like the resolution goes squirrely, but if I reduce the image size so it looks good on mobile it doesn't center at all on the web version. I default to the web version so the hell with mobile.

The original image came from the Letters section of Fantastic Story, Summer 1950. Fantastic Story reprinted older fiction from Wonder Stories magazine when it was sold to Beacon Publications and renamed Thrilling Wonder Stories. This particular illustration has a goofy 1940s SF feel to it so I had to appropriate it for my own nefarious uses, though I really should've done hand-lettered text. Shame I have no idea where my old lettering manuals are and I can only find the box of nibs for my lettering pen but no fucking pen.

Next up: Two new Captain Future synopses and some impressions of the first chunk of Triplanetary, the first book of the Lensman epic by E.E. Smith.

F This

I'm taking down part 1 of Brigands of the Moon--it'll be one long 100-150 page novel instead of a serial because the original is so effin' tedious to edit. The last three installments would work far better as one part.

That also means I can fix the cover.

So there.

Fan-Freakin'-Tastic

Halfway through part 2 of my ruination of Brigands of the Moon. I thought if I went out of town for a week I'd get all the editing done but all I managed was the first 23 out of 47 pages. Ehhh.

Since I haven't yet read anything in this Fantastic Story I can't decide if this guy is yanking the wires apart or jamming them together. He does somehow look pretty incompetent at whatever it is he's up to which is why I used him as a Spicy Science Stories cover version of Dr. Miles Long.

Judging by those out-of-control nipples it must be awful cold on that spaceship. Perhaps that guy's jerry-rigging the heating system.

Science fiction fans must be plenty willing to sell nylons to make a little extra cash to buy more science fiction. Or hamsters.

The new wonder animal! Delightful! Disposable! Buy 'em by the bag!

This mysterious ad must be aimed at victims of industrial accidents who want to work for "Uncle Sam." Maybe this faceless creeper will come to your house personally for "Examinations." "I Want You," he wheezes through his face-hole.