Planet Comics volume two

Planet Comics volume two (1940)
This is my second volume of this one, here collecting issues four to eight as originally published in 1940. Consulting both the first volume and my earlier review of the same, I notice that I've written the following:

Equally bewildering is Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers which reads a lot like an episode from the Boer War but for the spaceships which our narrator insists are seen making the trip through that cloudy stretch of space between Neptune and Pluto. These spaceships are of the kind with two wings extending out from the centre of the fuselage, wheels beneath, and a propeller on the nose, so I suspect the enterprise is informed by either a certain degree of recycling or a spectacular lack of imagination.

As I now realise, those spaceships bearing suspicious resemblance to aircraft of the forties actually turn up in Gale Allen of the Women's Space Battalion, the strip immediately following Kenny Carr of the Martian Lancers. I can only assume that by that point I was so punch drunk from having read the thing that I simply powered on through the end of Kenny's adventures without even noticing the sudden emphasis on Feminism, exemplified as it was by men commenting upon how well the women had done and rhetorically asking who says they are the weaker sex?

Anyway, I came back for a second helping mainly because Henry Kiefer's art on the amusingly named Spurt Hammond strip is fucking gorgeous, and surely enough so as to classify him as a neglected master of the form, seeing as how we all know about Fletcher Hanks by now.

I gather my copy of volume one may actually have been part of the original run which was recalled and revised due to the reproduction of the artwork being below standard. I'd assumed the quality of my copy was simply down to its utilising scans of ancient and yellowing comic books, but judging by the massively improved quality of this second volume, I guess I may have had a dud; but even ignoring the standard of reproduction, it seems clear that the issues reprinted here were simply better drawn, so I guess we're watching these artists learning and developing their craft as they work. There's no shortage of eye-popping material, but the general figure work and sense of design is improved. It's still stylised, undeniably of its time, but with a weird elegance - deco filtered through moody classicism resulting in panels with the pensive atmosphere of a de Chirico painting.

Before I get too carried away, I should confirm that I'm still talking about Planet Comics. It was, as I've discovered, the comic book - and hence junior - counterpart to Planet Stories, in which dad would have read the works of A.E. van Vogt and others, so it's science-fiction in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs with a hint of Hugo Gernsback. Planets are locales of general terrestrial composition, even Jupiter and Saturn, and they tend to be ruled over by Kings who usually live in castles, despite the presence of spacecraft or the occasional mad scientist; aliens are mostly bestial and brutish, distant relatives to the ogres and goblins of fairy tales. The stories are very, very repetitive, but with such a fascinating level of sheer insanity in the failure of any of it to add up as to overcome all shortcomings. Don Granval battles colossal beings to whom the Earth is but a bauble. Buzz Crandall and Sandra help a race of headless people rebel against the plants which have enslaved them, and all in swimwear. Then we have Chas M. Quinlan's beautifully drawn Crash Barker and the Zoom Sled providing a strange, almost ponderous contrast with the other strips in favouring conversation and formative characterisation over simple exposition and dramatic action. Fletcher Hanks single contribution is inevitably peculiar, but not necessarily more so than anything else here. The more of these reprints I read, the more it astonishes me that I hadn't heard of Planet Comics prior to happening upon the first collection back in 2016.