[Andrew999]

Imagination my surprise waking up this morning to find an old Charlton comic from 1954 splattered all across the UK media! Excitement isn’t a word long enough.

Was Dick Giordano’s Transformation in Strange Adventures 7 really the first transgender graphic story? There are many CBR members more expert than I, so I present to you the challenge of finding an earlier example (not just Sherlock in disguise or someone in drag – but true transgender) I wonder, for example, if there was an early pictorial portrayal of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando?

Anyway, on to a brief review of SA7:
Lovely Giordano cover with a rather startling phallic rocket embedded at an angle in the ground – with a round hole nearby…hmmm…. How did they get away with this stuff? The story broods with a sense of dark foreboding, nuclear war, blackmail, loneliness, death….an accident and an experiment in hormones that leads to a Mars-shattering irony – I bet you’re hooked? A six-page sci-fi masterpiece from Dead-Eyed Dick!

The rest of the issue struggles to keep pace – Frank Follo’s Doomed Civilisation has good grouping in the panels and a neat twist in the end, though, hand on heart, I guessed it. Stan Campbell’s Homecoming was a similar tale – a bit static, but Tony Tallarico’s Eternity in Space was better with a very believable space station and an amoral tale of twinned psycho-clones in sibling conflict.

Link to the book: Space Adventures 07

[crashryan]

Wasn't there an EC science fiction story in which humanoid aliens(?) changed gender over time? I have a vague memory of a story with this gimmick, but I have no EC's to check it against. I seem to recall it was drawn either by Kamen or Feldstein.