However I find a lot to like in the final Fiction House issues, especially in the art department. Bill Benulis did spectacular work. John Belcastro (Johnny Bell), Vic Carrabotta, and often A. Albert produced work that rose above typical comic book SF. I'd have liked to have seen them try out some continuing characters, but the writing was on the wall...bye-bye Fiction House.[/html]
I don't find anything wrong with the artwork in those last 3 issues. On average, it's as good as, or better than, what you'd find in most of those other SF anthology-type comics (...inferior to EC's, of course, but what other company's wasn't?) It's the
writing... which was as "OFF-the-wall" as you could get. Plots made as little sense as possible, with the most hamfisted approach to the 'twist ending' imaginable. The earmarks here seem to indicate that the scripts were all (or mostly, anyway) the product of the same writer, who repeats his preoccupation with certain tropes like alien 'changelings', paranoia about artificial intelligence, etc. He also has a strange style of running narration in captions, using lots of ellipses [...] and frequently changing his tense in a way that's very distracting. These three issues represent the absolute
worst of the SF anthologies (storywise, as opposed to solely based on the artwork) from the 1952-53 SF boomlet. The single 4-page Space Rangers story in #71 is a perfect example. It reads like it was re-written to shoehorn the characters of Flint Baker and Reef Ryan into the plot. And what do our heroes DO in the story? Well, nothing worth mentioning -- literally. They do absolutely nothing, except make wry observations like "We're just along for the ride". They're glorified chauffeurs for their Martian boss. The thing with the one-shot anthology SF story is, being as how it can't be carried just on the novelty of a series feature's concept or lead characters, it actually has to have a clever plot that makes some sense, with a way to pace the story to fit the requisite number of pages allotted. These stories have none of that, which makes them pretty tedious to read despite some not-bad artwork. The type of simplistic writing that was excusable 10 or 15 earlier just won't cut it by 1953, but I actually think these stories are worse (if better drawn) than the ones appearing in the earliest issues of PLANET Comics.
