OUTER SPACE!

 

COMICS, THE SPACE RACE,
MONSTER THRILLS & MORE!

The Jellymen Are Coming...
It is the hanging onto the things that give us pleasure that makes one a collector – and later too, the saving, rescuing, even conserving or restoring things – but no horror or fantasy film fan really ever needed, in reality, an example of a Forrest J Ackerman. We were already ‘collectors’ at an early age; comics, bubble gum cards, cigarette cards, matchbox tops, and general ephemera such as postage stamps, foreign coins, old keys... anything slightly curious or exotic!

If you were not influenced by your peer group at school then to be influenced by your parents was a distinct possibility. My father, having grown up in the East End of London with little to call his own, made sure my sister and I were well supplied with comics (and sweets!) on Fridays, 'pay-day'. So at the end of the week copies of Dandy or Beano appeared, - Beezer and Topper were his preference (and he was a big fan of Jane and Garth in the Daily Mirror), or War comics passed onto him by work mates. Later pocket-money was proffered and at the local shop down the road, the choice of comic, be it Victor or Valiant, Hornet or Hotspur, Lion or Tiger... was often influenced by the ‘free gift’ on offer that particular week!

Below: a regular free gift in UK comic weeklies
(photo: Lew Stringer from his BLIMEY! blog)

 

Trips to the open air market in Harlow's new town centre were an opportunity to purchase second hand copies of imported Action, Superman, Batman or World’s Finest. ‘DC Comics’ were much favoured, a little rarer in those days, and a taste of another world – America with its big cars, bubble gum and “Tootsie Rolls”, sky scrapers and Cape Canaveral, and within the DC pages, "100 Toy Soldiers" for just $1.25!

For my generation, born even before war-time rationing had ended, the race to put men into space was the true Wonder of the Age. Rockets and spacemen – how we looked forward to the future! And whilst we busied ourselves pasting newspaper clippings of the first satellite missions, into our scrapbooks, we were captivated and thrilled by the wonders of DC Comics and our home-grown Topper, Beezer and Eagle weeklies.
Between the launching of the Russian Sputnik in the autumn of 1957 and the launch of Telstar in the summer of 1962, we thrilled to the Jellymen (Feb 1960 - September 1960), The Black Sapper (1959) and his futuristic tunnelling machine called the Earthworm, Robot Archie (the most popular strip in Lion during the 1960s), Captain Condor – Space Pilot, and Dan Dare – Pilot of the Future!

The Jellymen, I should point out, were not creatures from space but creatures from the depths of the sea - and somehow all the more terrifying. A few short years later we were kept in suspense by The Iron Eaters, another centre pages adventure in the Beezer, in which Earth is threatened by huge iron-eating sponges from space. Blowing one up in spectacular fashion only resulted in a multitude of mini-sponges on the rampage! Both The Iron Eaters and The Jellymen were drawn by the uniquely talented Ken Hunter.

TV watching c.1960, Harlow, Essex




Scary: ITV's Pathfinders In Space

 

Television, even if it remained for many of us quite small and in black & white for some years to come, was another opportunity for suspense and monsters. Whilst our parents thrilled to Quatermass & the Pit (1958), the last of a trilogy that kept the whole nation in thrall during its initial outing, us youngsters had to wait until 1960 for our very own space thrills in Target Luna (featuring a trip around the moon!), and its sequel Pathfinders in Space (in which two space ships set off on the first trip to the Moon and encounter a third ship of unknown origin). I recall the cliff-hanger sequences of the crew exploring the Moon's surface scared the pants off us! Target Luna and the three sequels were enormously popular at the time. One episode was broadcast on Christmas Day 1960 and the production team claimed it had the second highest audience of the day after the Queen’s Speech. An academic study of children's attitudes to television viewing found the Target Luna audience to be, "discerning, intelligent and capable to handle new and innovative subject matter”.

Kids Stuff: Target Luna

A rather more ‘adult’ sci-fi thriller for which I was somehow allowed to stay up late, during the autumn nights of 1961, was the outstanding A for Andromeda, about messages from outer space and a computer creating an artificial girl in the form of newcomer Julie Christie. It was highbrow stuff and shot Christie to film stardom!


Girl from Outer Space: Julie Christie



String-puppets entertained us with the futuristic Supercar (1961), and Fireball XL5 (1962) and Dr Who made his first appearance on our TV screens, with monsters, galore in 1963. The whole family thrilled to that one; strange planets, giant moths and fearsome Daleks!

Bug Eyed Monsters! : Did we really hide behind the settee?
The very first Dr Who, fondly remembered: William Hartnell (1908 – 1975)



Puppet drama & Dr Who's Daleks become comic adventures in the popular TV 21



Yet it was scares of another kind which found us all sat around our TV set in 1966 and later in 1968; Mystery and Imagination (24 episodes). Who now remembers David Buck introducing each week, yet another remarkable and sometimes spine-tingling TV production of classic Poe (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’), Sheridan Le Fanu (‘Carmilla’), or Louis Stevenson (‘The Body Snatcher’), and later ‘Frankenstein’ (11/11/1968) and ‘Dracula’ (18/11/1968) staring Ian Holm and Denholm Elliott respectively? These two productions are outstanding. They are surely as close as any filmmaker has come in attempting fidelity to the original gothic novels.

Superb Gothic thrills:  Mystery & Imagination

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END NOTE: "Dan Dare (full name Colonel Daniel McGregor Dare) was chief pilot of the Interplanet Space Fleet. He was born in Manchester, England, in 1967 and educated at Rossall School. Although not a super-hero, he sometimes pulled off exceptional piloting and often proved extraordinarily lucky. He excelled at jiu jitsu, but he most often found non-violent solutions to predicaments. He was bound by a sense of honour, never lied, and would rather die than break his word. His lean-faced character was recognisable by the outer tips of his eyebrows, which were wavy. His uniform looked like a typical British Army type (Frank Hampson used his own World War II army uniform as a model), though a lighter green. In place of British rank insignia it had coloured stripes and circles on the shoulder boards. His cap badge was a vertical, antique rocketship in a circle with one five-pointed star on either side. Initially, Dare was to be portrayed as a chaplain."

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