Description

Expanding Fantagraphics' project to reprint Marvel Comics' 1950s genre titles, this volume blasts off to space opera adventure.

In the vein of earlier comics-to-multimedia stars Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Atlas Comics launched their own pulp hero in 1951, looking ahead to the futuristic year 2000. Across five issues of Space Squadron (and one of Space Worlds), headline talents including George Tuska, Werner Roth and Allen Bellman (with back-up features by Joe Maneely, Christopher Rule, George Klein and Vern Henkel) showed Captain Jet Dixon and his Space Squadron blasting into action, facing cosmic threats like "The Armada of Death," "The Space Demons," "Terror from the Deep," "The Temptress of Jupiter," and "The Midnight Horror."

Come 1953, Hank Chapman and Joe Maneely gazed further into the future, envisioning the distant year 2075 and the adventures of Speed Carter, Spaceman. Scripted throughout by Chapman, Maneely launched and drew the first three issues before handing off to one issue each by Mike Sekowsky, George Tuska and Bob Forgione, with back-up features by John Romita, Maneely, and Bill Savage. As other aspects of the Atlas line leaned into the peak of pre-Code horror, the Captain of the Space Sentinels and young cadet Johnny Day battled monstrous aliens with stories including "The Space Trap," "A Slaughter in Space," "Die, Spaceman, Die," and "The Thing in Outer Space."

Unseen in 70 years, scanned in high resolution, restored to perfection, and packaged as one extra-sized, beautiful hardcover volume, In the Days of the Rockets will open a wormhole to the early cold-war four-color era of futuristic science fantasy. HANK CHAPMAN (1915-1973) wrote steadily for a variety of comics publishers between 1940 and 1967, usually uncredited, but he has been identified as the author of several hundred stories. He is most known for his war stories while on staff at Atlas in the 1950s and at DC in the '50s and '60s. JOE MANEELY (1926-1958) landed at Timely in 1949 following the Street & Smith line's collapse and freelanced for Timely/Atlas for the next eight years, becoming one of the most prolific and important artists of the Atlas period. MIKE SEKOWSKY (1923-1989) was a prolific workman of the Silver Age of comics, notably co-creating the Justice League of America for DC in 1960 and having a run as writer/artist on Wonder Woman. But he began at Timely, drawing everything from Ziggy Pig and Silly Seal to The Human Torch and The Sub-Mariner.