Startling!

Oh yeah, here's another one I bought because I liked the cover, Startling Stories May 1950. Where do I start in all the what-the-fuckery going on here? Come to think of it, there's also some serious what-the-fuckery going on inside too and I haven't even looked at the ads.

Dang it, is it freezing cold out there on the launch pad or is it pleasantly balmy? You certainly can't tell by what the couple's wearing since she's barely dressed and he's got on mittens. Mittens, on a grown man. I keep looking for the little string that keeps him from losing them but it must be up his sleeves.

Of course there's a weirdly toy-like rocket crash with guys on parachutes flinging themselves out the airlock right into the rocket's flaming exhaust. I would've bought it for that even if it didn't have the Captain Future story "Children of the Sun" which I already had in a paperback reprint of all the Startling Stories short Futures. I guess 1950 was the point when they finally gave up writing honking big space opera novels for pulp mags because people were laughing at them. In the space of a couple of years they went from 100 page novels to 20 page stories.

But the paperback reprint doesn't have the illustrations which meant I would've missed out on this weird flaming nekkid freakout. 

Really, I haven't got the foggiest what's going on here since I'm reading Captain Future stories in order and I've still got a handful to go before I get to this one. The only thing I can say for certain is that Curt is inexplicably nekkid and equally inexplicably on fire. There's also a flaming nekkid woman at the top which I'll assume isn't Joan Randall.

See, this is what happens when you go camping and take brownies from hippies.

It's upset Simon so much that it's wrecked his ability to fly upright. And no, this isn't the first time some layout monkey put the Brain's drawing in upside down. I mean really, you should know nobody ever puts their deely-bobbers on under their mouth.

Just to balance things out, here's another nekkid woman, though she's in a completely different story I also haven't read.