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.

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!

Pulpity-Pulp-Pulp

Took a break from Captain Future and read Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, Startling Stories, Jan. 1940. Pretty entertaining, as far as lightweight space opera pulp stuff goes. It takes place a couple hundred years after men first went into space and all the planets are populated not by old civilizations like in the Captain Future stories (which take place only a generation after spaceflight was developed) but by Earthmen who have evolved to cope with that planet's conditions. A high gravity makes the people short and squatty, minerals in the atmosphere makes skin yellow, etc. Not as much stupid, goofy fun as when the populations are non-Earth humanoids with civilizations older than Earth's, but still worth a read.

The Three Planeteers are Earthman John Thorn, Venusian Sual Av and Mercurian Gunner Welk, who are wanted for the thefts of stuff all over the system, but not really. They're actually undercover spies--robbing ships and such gets them access to all sorts of information they couldn't have gotten otherwise. The only person who knows what they're really up to is the Chairman of the Earth Government who's been sending them out to spy on the League of Cold Worlds (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus) since they're plotting to take over the Inner Alliance (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars). Apparently nobody wants Pluto.

"You take it!" 
"No, you take it!"
Rejected Pluto makes sadface.

The Inner Alliance has a honking big secret weapon to use against the League's invading ships, since the Alliance couldn't be bothered to build up their defenses even though they knew full well something was brewing, and decided to throw everything into this fancy weapon they haven't even tested. Whatever. It also uses a shit-ton of radite (an isotope of radium, old-timey SF's favorite thing) and they can only get huge quantities of the stuff on Erebus, the tenth planet, so the Planeteers volunteer to go. 

The problem with Erebus is that only one explorer has come back from there and nobody knows why. Martin Cain has been dead for years and never told anyone but his daughter Lana how he escaped. She's now the leader of a community of pirates called the Companions of Space who use the asteroid belt as their hideout and base of operations. Hamilton will recycle these pirates and how they're able to hide and navigate in the asteroids in the fairly juvenile Captain Future novel Outlaw World.

Since this one is actually worth reading, if only for Erebus and what happened to the disappeared explorers, I'll stop here and ruin another story later.

On to the last Captain Future magazine put out before the magazine went under without warning due to wartime paper shortages. I thought there'd be a mention in the Startling Stories that picked up the novel meant for the Summer 1944 issue but I've flipped through my ratty Spring 1945 copy and haven't seen anything. Balls. Of course it's in an earlier 1944 Startling Stories I don't have.

Yeah, whatever. After a couple of "ehh" entries we have a pretty good one, Days of Creation, Spring 1944, a story full of the kind of goofy stuff you'd find in Outlaws of the Moon or in half of The Seven Space Stones, so no plot spoilers for this one. No major ones anyway.

The Solar System is overpopulated like all of a sudden and so Captain Future proposes they build a whole new planet (completely ignoring all those countless asteroids in the system with atmospheres people could go live on) using that fancy matter-creating doodad from Quest Beyond the Stars. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, right?

This plan is opposed by sleazy Hartley Brooks, who has the--wait for it--monopoly on all the slum towers on all the planets in the system and he'd rather not have his slumlord empire ruined by some damn-fool science dink. Not like he couldn't get the contract to throw together some slum towers for this new planet or anything.

Anyhow, he decides to have Future and the guys killed when they're off putzing around on an archaeological expedition but only manages to bury the Futuremen and give Curt amnesia. Another random criminal guy steals Curt's atomic-powered ring and the Comet and thinks it'd be awesome to hire some Futuremen impersonators and pretend to be their assistant so he could whoosh around space in this whiz-bang hotrod spaceship.

Don't worry, pirates pick up amnesiac Curt and a random prospector finds the Futuremen when they dig themselves out of the dirt like a month later. You were worried, right? No?

Joan also gets to make out with three guys in this story but two of them are Captain Future. One is scraggly grabby pirate Curt with amnesia, one is normal boring Curt after the brain surgery shown on the cover, and the third guy is an actor paid to impersonate Captain Future but he's kind of stupid and also a lush so everyone says it's a shame he hit his head in that explosion. Good times.

You really want to read it now, right? Especially the grabby pirate bit? No? Not even the part at the end where Curt gets his memory back and Joan tells him she liked things about scraggly Curt but won't say what but we all know it's the grabby pirate stuff?

As expected neither the Plutonian slug-horse nor the mind-meld crystal deus ex machina thingy from Worlds to Come are mentioned. Maybe Joan said the hell with Curt being able to read her mind so the crystal is in whatever passes for a junk drawer in the future and the slug-horse is just dead.

This is a Planet Police uniform, by the way. You can tell that room is really cold because of Joan's pointy . . . gloves.

Now for the first Startling Stories Captain Future, Red Sun of Danger, Spring 1945, by Edmond Hamilton writing as Brett Sterling. Not one of my favorites, mostly because there's a planet called Roo and an ancient people called Kangas. Damned distracting if you ask me. Despite that it's not a bad story even though it has yet another monopoly for Captain Future to break up, this time it's a chemical called vitron which combats the poisons that cause the human body to age.

Vitron is only grown on the planet Roo way out in another star system. The human colonists are worried about the native Roons going wacko and killing colonists, and meanwhile somebody's stirring up the Roons so they go wacko and kill colonists. They believe if the colonists don't leave Roo then the Old Ones (Kangas) will destroy the universe. Meanwhile, the colonists don't believe there really are Old Ones, especially the guy who's stirring up the Roons so he can have the vitron production all to himself.

Captain Future sneaks to Roo by pretending to be a criminal who shoots Future who's really Otho in disguise, instead of just dressing up like somebody else like he always does, then the rest of the Futuremen turn up in disguise, as do Joan and Marshal Gurney. Really, they all should've taken the same spaceship and saved some space bucks.

It turns out there really are Old Ones, vaguely Lovecraftian black blobby things that had been defeated by the ancient Denebians with a psycho-amplifier that amplifies brain waves so they've been sleeping for thousands of years until somebody disturbs them--like that guy who wants the vitiron monopoly, so he stirs up the natives by blowing up the Kangas' resting place. Nice.

That deely-bobber psycho-amplifier's a great look, Curt. You should make that a permanent part of your Captain Future outfit. You should also pay way more attention to your half-dressed girlfriend. Her pointy . . . boots . . . tell me it's a little cold there on Roo.

More of the Same

Here we go again. I've been too lazy to post these synopses when I'm done reading so I'm throwing them out there in a huge pile. It also means I've forgotten a lot of plot, planned punchlines and sad jokes. Dammit.

Captain Future, Worlds to Come, Spring 1943. This is the first one not written by Edmond Hamilton. He was afraid he was going to be drafted and contracted Joseph Samachson who wrote this one under the house name Brett Sterling. Later Hamilton would write a couple under that name though I'm not recalling why exactly, though it might've been because he wasn't being taken seriously when he was writing space opera which was rapidly becoming outdated and considered juvenile. Really, all he needed to do was to porn it up a little. Sheesh.

We haven't had Curt and Joan on a lame date in a while, at least not since they got stuck on a dying planet together for two months with like a hundred convicts and I'm pretty certain they didn't have soap or toothpaste. You'd think they'd be sick of each other after that since it'd sort of be like seeing someone you like with the flu or food poisoning. Imagine them all scroungy and smelly after digging up ore for two months building a fucking spaceship.

Anyhow, Curt invites Joan and Ezra Gurney to visit him on the Moon and what does he do? He leaves his girlfriend inside with her boss and a cranky old man's brain in a box while he and Otho and Grag are outside on the Moon's surface being jackasses to each other. They have a Plutonian slug-horse, something they've never mentioned having ever, and they're daring each other to ride it and when somebody winds up face-planting in the Moon dust they all laugh like jackass guys do when their friends get hurt.

Curt hasn't learned that the best (meaning worst) way to impress a girl is to let her watch you do stupid shit with your stupid friends so really, he should've told her to put on her spacesuit and come up to the surface to watch the injuries pile up.

Simon whips up a mind-meld crystal deus ex machina thingy out of nowhere so Joan and Curt can communicate by thought waves which is seriously creepy. No way do I want some guy knowing what I'm thinking, though it would save a lot of arguments in the end if I could think you suck so much ass you stupid motherfucker at them really hard. This doodad becomes totally mega-important for the last half of the book, then it's never mentioned again.

Back to Jackasses on the Moon. Now if this slug-horse comes from Pluto, which in Hamilton's space opera universe has a breathable atmosphere, how is it breathing on the Moon which Hamilton has only given a limited underground atmosphere for the Moon Men? Does it just not need to breathe, like Moon wolves? When the Jackass Trio is done with the slug-horse do they just leave it on the Moon's surface to suffocate? Do they pour a couple hundred pounds of salt on it? Like the mind-meld crystal it's never mentioned again.

Anyhow, after Grag sits on the slug-horse and flattens it (Otho thinks this is hysterical but he's a jerkass) Ezra tells them there's a Planet Police emergency where a ship is hurtling towards the Sun and of course they can't do anything about it. I'm not sure why anyone bothers to call the Planet Police unless it's to ask them if their refrigerator is running. So the guys head out in the Comet, leaving the now forgotten slug-horse to be eaten by Moon wolves I guess (really I think I'm the only one who cares about the foul thing at this point), and they manage to stop the ship before it crashes into the Sun.

The three guys on board have come through dimensions looking for Captain Future since their own government can't solve their own problems, much like the Solar System's President, so they put the dimensional drive doodad from the scuttled ship onto the Comet and away they go. Partway there they break a rocket tube and Curt goes outside the ship to switch it out like he's changing a goddamn tire and his magnetic boots fail and he falls off and they leave him. When they finally realize he's gone they turn around but can't find him and so they assume he's dead for, like, maybe the third or fourth time in this series and continue on to the system that needs their help.

Anyone else would've written this as a jackass guy practical joke gone wrong. You know, they leave him floating in space and forget to come back for him or something.

So Curt floats in space and by using his proton pistol he creates some momentum to get to a planet where he plans to build another fucking spaceship from scratch but instead of a hundred convicts to dig up ore for him he only has a handful of primitive people who he can't even teach how to use a shovel. After few days of (hopefully) screaming and cursing at smelly grunting cave people Curt finally realizes he has the mind-meld crystal thingy and contacts Joan through dimensions or something and he tells her how to use a machine in his Moon lab to switch bodies with one of the smelly grunting cave people so he can build this fucking spaceship.

I don't recall if this was a mind-switch machine recently invented by Curt and Simon or if it's the mind-switch machine from that earlier novel where a bad guy uses a Neptunian mind-switch machine to swap Curt's mind with a Neptunian fish-man, whatever story that was. It made total sense in context but sounds like something stupid I just now made up.

Ahh, Captain Future's Challenge, Summer 1940.

Back to Worlds to Come, when Joan and the smelly cave woman switch bodies Curt tries to kiss her then suddenly decides he'd rather not, even though technically it's Joan, but I guess the real Joan knows what toothpaste and soap are. He doesn't say Cave!Joan is smelly, just that she doesn't look right. That's the blue woman wearing the leopard skin on the cover. You'd think he'd be all over that but this is Captain Future who sadly isn't all over anything. Sorry, Joan.

Anyhow, blah blah blah they don't have to build a spaceship since the bad guys invading the planet of those three guys from the beginning I'd forgotten about have landed nearby and Curt and Joan stow away on it. Blah blah blah, they defeat the bad guys and everybody's happy. The End.

This installment is by Edmond Hamilton writing as Brett Sterling. The Star of Dread, Captain Future Summer 1943. The only Captain Future magazine cover that doesn't even have Captain Future on it has Joan Randall being menaced by the Cosmo Kramerbird. "Yo yo ma," it shrieks. "Yo yo ma!"

This one has some what-the-fuckery going on but not in the plotting. There are some mutant creatures called man-horses, man-dogs, man-birds and man-tigers which are all regular animals but with human faces. Eww. Reminds me too much of that brief scene in the 1970s Invasion of the Body Snatchers where that freaky-ass dog with the human face runs up to the camera. I don't wanna be anywhere near these things.

shivers

On my world a man-beaver is called a mangina.

These man-beasts were mutants made by the evil scientists as slaves on one of the first worlds. A running storyline in Hamilton's novels is that an ancient race has seeded the universe with various human species mutated to survive on whatever planet they've been dumped onto. This is the quick and dirty explanation for why all the different humanoid species in the Solar System can interbreed with one another, and towards the end of the series Captain Future sort of abandons his raison d'être of fighting bad people who use science for bad shit and goes hunting for the birthplace of all humanity.

There's also an interesting bit that didn't get used often enough in this series where bad guys kidnap Joan and instead of torturing her to make her tell where the fancy science doodad is hidden they tell her they'll kill Curt instead. This might've been a nice excuse for them to keep whatever sad non-relationship they have a secret which would make it way more exciting and they might actually kiss more than once every six months, but that would've been way too icky for the kiddies.

Here's another one whose cover I like but I don't yet own an original copy. Captain Future, Magic Moon, Winter 1944. Curt and Joan are menaced by a Swallower, which is a huge flat swimming thing with a big mouth that lives in the oceans of Neptune. In the story only Captain Future is attacked by one but I guess Earle Bergey thought the cover needed a screaming braless girl in shorts.

I love how Captain Future's gloves never match his space suit. Teal blue and red with brown leather? It's like he's colorblind or something.

This is another Edmond Hamilton as Brett Sterling novel and it's one of those fun WTF ones that's worth reading so I won't ruin the plot. A rich financier wants, hey whadayaknow, the diamond mining monopoly of Pluto's moon Styx so his movie company sets out to make a movie about some of Captain Future's adventures called The Ace of Space. Total crapshit name but whatever. It'll be filmed completely on location on whatever planet Future did whatever he did and the financier's plan is to take over Styx when they start filming there using some movie asshattery to defeat the natives.

They put out a call for tall redhaired guys to be in this movie instead of hiring real actors and putting makeup on them. Yeah, awesome! So Curt disguises himself slightly and pretends to be a drygoods clerk. Drygoods. They'll still have those in the future? Is this some kinda futuristic curly-mustached hipster kinda shit? I couldn't tell you when was the last time I went into a drygoods store that wasn't in some sort of gold mining Bug Tussle theme park kind of a place. I don't know why they couldn't have made him something vaguely futuristic like a spacesuit salesman or a vacuum tube polisher or a food-cube clerk. 

He acts like a total space-sick wuss, whines a lot, screws up his lines and drops his prop pistol constantly, coming across as such a loser that Joan doesn't even recognize him. She's been a pain in the ass following this film crew all over the System just to make sure they get the details of Future's heroic shit right and she thinks this Chan Carson dweeb isn't worthy of cleaning up the dessicated remains of Captain Future's squashed Plutonian slug-horse. You'd think she would've memorized every detail of the guy's face, every pore, even that weird eyebrow hair that always grows the wrong way. You know, from all those years of being a creepy fangirl. But you'd be totally wrong.

Poor Curt. If he was to suddenly stop being a big hero Joan would dump his ass in a heartbeat.

sad trombone

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.

Mmmm, Pulpy

Not only did 1940s pulps try to sell you false teeth, eyeglasses and trusses by mail, they also made you poop. Observe Betty and Sally gleefully discussing bowel movements or lack thereof. Once Betty has an Ex-Lax or three she's so excited to finally take a dump she's inadvertently revealed herself to be a freaking Toon. 

 

Besides that troubling scene, Startling Stories, January 1940 also has Edmond Hamilton's The Three Planeteers, his space opera take on the Three Musketeers, and it has the beginnings of the world he filled out later in the Captain Future novels. I kept wondering why he kept referring to people as "planeteers" thinking maybe it had something to do with pioneers out in the frontier of space but since Captain Future obviously wasn't living on an asteroid in a log cabin plowing his land claim with a robot it didn't make any sense. Musketeers, duh.

  

On to Captain Future, The Comet Kings, whose cover has diddly-squat to do with the plot. I was hoping for some awesome giant bats but I'm disappointed yet again. Joan's creepy eyes show she's right on the verge of revealing that she's a Toon once she's popped a couple Ex-Lax. 

Anyway, someone or something has been snatching ships out of space and nobody can figure out who or why. The Planet Police also doesn't seem to know they should tell everyone not to fly through that part of space so they don't disappear but considering their past incompetence I'm not surprised. Of course Marshal Ezra Gurney and top agent Joan Randall investigate and go missing like everyone else. Because why the fuck not.

It's a wonder the whole solar system hasn't been stolen and sold for scrap.

Because the Planet Police are little more than interplanetary Keystone Kops they're forced to call in Captain Future. He figures out that anyone flying near Halley's Comet disappears so he goes to investigate and is sucked right into the comet. There he finds immortal glowy electrical people, everyone who'd gone missing imprisoned, and some evil race that electrified the Halley's Comet people against their wills for some reason I'm not remembering but isn't at all important for this synopsis. 

Once he finds Joan, who's now an immortal glowy electrical woman he can't touch, Curt gets all grabby and is immediately electrocuted. This should've been comedy fodder but it's played straight with, like, "hungry arms" that can't hold the woman he loves and all. 

Eww. I think I liked them better as a bickering non-couple, frankly.

Joan says there's no way to defeat the glowy electrical people and Curt should get electrified just like she has so they can live there forever which is a way more creative way to trap a guy than getting knocked up. Anyhow, he converts to electricity to fight the bad guys, which would've been hilarious if later they found out Curt was AC and Joan was DC and they were stuck with each other until the end of time, but I'm not writing this so we have to play the cards we're dealt.

The amusing part is that he's agreed to become an electrical glowy thing like her but he works his ass off to figure out how to undo it in a couple of days. He also makes an empty promise to Joan at the end that there's an asteroid with a garden they can live on...one day. Like, when he's defeated all the criminals and broken up all the monopolies in the solar system. So, never. Sorry Joan.

  

I like the Worlds of Tomorrow articles in this magazine which a lot of the pdf downloads don't bother with even though they add a lot to the world building in this series. This particular issue has a map of the Earth after 2027 when volcanic activity went nutso, new mountain ranges formed and earthquakes abounded. Looking at this map I'd advise everyone to sell that waterfront property in Florida right now. I also see digging the Chunnel was a complete waste of time since you'll be able to just walk over to France once the ground stops heaving.

  

The Captain Future pdf downloads also leave out the articles on the Futuremen from that issue, which is a shame because they have a lot of backstory on the characters and some are short adventures, mostly involving young Curt Newton making an ass of himself. This particular one has him turning 18 and leaving the moon for the first time, trying to break up a monopoly on Pluto and getting his clock cleaned. The guy should've visited a Jovian whorehouse instead and gotten his clock cleaned in a completely different way.

  

A couple days ago I found a zip file on the Capitaine Flam site that has all the Futuremen articles so you can read the whole thing without me having to photograph magazine pages. I'd somehow managed to miss it in all the non-English files.

I'll end this post with the tasty back cover of The Comet Kings whose horrific case of athlete's foot seems to have spread to the paper itself.