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[Robb_K]

Thanks for your excellent and detailed analysis Robb. Glad you got off to a good start with the character. In essence I agree with most of what you say, so all I can do is throw in a few  of my own observations.

I've never been to a cocktail party but I can only imagine if I divulged that my real life information was gained from reading a sci-fi comic my conversation wouldn't last long!    I'm wondering if Sinn is genuinely Asian, and 1) the green skin is a by-product of his experiments to increase his intelligence with gamma ray treatments? It might explain why he always seems so angry. 

2) Jet's ability to make weapons out old rubbish signifies to the reader that he is genuinely a Captain of Science, I'm sure I've  seen Tony Stark do the same sort of thing. In the same way, Sinn's readiness to dispose of even the hottest underling signifies that he is really a big shot villain, I've seen everyone from the Claw to the Octopus pull the same stunt. So too does his ability to read people's lips no matter which way they're facing. His Moon does however seem a bit bigger inside than it does outside, so I'm wondering if he uses some kind of TARDIS technology? Thank heavens he never got hold of Ezra Walter's time machine! 

I love the "typo" about the underground burro, this is as good as the blooper about the termite bomb! Maybe just a lazy letterer, 3) (no relation to my blues hero Lazy Lester!) overcome by Fox's wordiness? The convenience of using DDT to kill an alien who you've already convinced me just happens to look like an insect, is as credible as him happening to have some very lead-heavy paint hanging around to stop radiation. The science, I guess, is about kindergarten level but "good enough for comics."

4) Space Ace is really not worthy of consideration, god bless you for giving it so much attention, I look forward to your review of issue #2.

All the best
K1ngcat

1) I think Sinn is always angry because he's an evil villain who hates Mankind, and wants to destroy it.  Maybe he was beaten constantly by a drunken father?  I think it IS an interesting trait for him to constantly dump his underlings because they fail (being imperfect).  That, after all, is likely why he hates himself, and all Humans.  It would be better for the reader if he would think that in a thinking balloon, or yell that at an underling when he pushes him or her out of his spacecraft (at least once, in his introduction story.  The problem with most 36-page comic books is that there is too little space for developing the story setting, the players characters and background, the plot, pacing the story elements for suspense, etc.  But when you fill the entire book (or most of it) with chapters of the same story, or episodes in the saga of the same character, you have room to establish those key biographical elements and flesh out the characters.  I think Sinn would be a  good recurring Space Fu Manchu type villain.

2) Given that Jet makes weapons and other inventions out of discarded junk, I wonder I Gardner had been a fan of Carl Barks wacky inventor, "Gyro Gearloose"?  He is my most used character, after Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.  That way, I can write and draw science fiction comedy stories dealing with the serious scientific theories regarding time warps, possibilities of time travel, different dimensions of existence, possible ways to defy gravity, etc.

3) I'm a big fan of Lazy Lester, too.  I bought a bunch of his records back in the 1950s.  Small World, eh?  Ha! Ha!  "Lazy Letterer" would be a funny name for a Blues singer.  Swamp is nice.  But I like Zydeko even better, especially all in French.  Do you like Clifton Chenier?  But my favourite Blues is Chicago Blues from 1945-1963 or so.  I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s first listening to my fathers Blues 78 RPM records. 

4) I do agree that "Space Ace" is real drek (as we call things lower than substandard in Noord Holland).  Considering the pay the writers got for writing comic book stories, I can't blame them for not doing much research, if any at all.  I do agree with panther that Gardner (whose writing is generally a lot better than this tripe, was likely NOT the writer of "Space Ace".  I thank you for your gushing gesture of thanks for my review.  But, nearing the end of my life, I would rather be blessed for never deliberately hurting  another person in any way (other than physically only in self defence), rather than being remembered for taking the time to review a bloody awful comic book story!   . Actually, due to extreme time pressures of work, family obligations and medical appointments, I did all I could to finish Issue #1, AND take on the job of hosting the now current fortnights review (which I had originally planned to farm out to another member).  I had planned to skip "Jet Power 2", figuring it is more of the same.  IF I get a little extra time, I'll glance at that issue.  But, even if I review it, it will likely just be a comment or two on each story, mentioning whether or not I liked it.

[K1ngcat]

Well, Robb, I'll gladly remember you as one of those rare humans who never deliberately hurt another, though you've piqued my curiosity as to whom you may have had to hurt in self defense.

That aside, having just the slightest notion of how many other responsibilities you have, I'd happily absolve you of any responsibility you might feel you have, to review Jet Powers #2.

Gyro Gearloose rings a tiny bell for me, something else for me to investigate, I'll have a dig around and see what turns up.

By coincidence I do like Clifton Chenier, but like you I'm  big fan of 50s & 60s Chicago Blues. I spent 15 years or more playing in Blues Bands, hosting Blues Jams, and writing biographies and reviews for the British Blues Archive. Sadly all behind me now as I have serious mobility issues and have been housebound for the last few years. Still, Alexa helps me keep in touch with some of my my favourite albums.

I'm looking forward to reading the two UK Sci Fi comics you've posted in the next reading group, meantime I wish you all the best
K1ngcat

[Robb_K]

Jet Power 2

The Three Million Year Old Men
I agree with Scrounges point that The Kroog are NOT 3 million years old while travelling in Jet Powers time.  Having a birthdate 3 million years later, makes them the epitome of youth, at the grand young age of negative 3 million +!!!   .  Man, I would like to have had 3 million years before getting old!

Very nasty of Dr. Walters to send two of his "friends" into the future without having tested his machine to see if it is easy to use in a reasonably safe manner.  I used a similar plotline to that, myself, in my own, as yet, unpublished science fiction book series, featuring a bumbling, egotistical, university professor, archaeologist, who happens to be a robot, from about 30,000 years into our future.  He lives on Planet Earth, whose Human population has all died off, and its only sentient beings are self-perpetuating, artificially intelligent Robots.  He absolutely HATES the boring existence of these "people", who, because of their perfect mathematical logic, all think and act alike (except for himself and a few other "deviants" (who must require adjustments to their motherboards to fix their defects).  Wanting to go back to his perceived "Golden Age" of Earth, when the sentient Robots were first starting to be integrated into Human society, he builds an especially large time machine, whose chamber appears to be a benign meeting hall hired for parties.  Our bumbling protagonist kidnaps his wife, children parents, in-laws, and his few best friends and their immediate families, and sends himself, together with all of them, back to that "Golden Age", as he thought they would like that World better (just as he would).

Interesting that Su Shan, who used to be Jets prisoner, seems to be on friendly terms with him now.  So, Jet finds Walters time machine, and uses it to search blindly over the millennia to try to find where in time The Kroog scouting party has gone.  On the surface, that seems a totally worthless effort.  After travelling to the time The Earth is dead because The Sun is losing its last bit of energy (a few billion years after Earth was burnt to a trip by The Suns expansion, and then to The Earths time of formation (ridiculously trying to imply that he has now covered every day of the Earths existence, Jet realises that he should not have wasted his time.  But, Jet remembered that Walters had a remote control device for the time machine, and uses it to take The Kroog to a time where he can meet them.  The author uses a giant thought balloon to have Jet thinking to himself about how he built his own time machine and used Walters remote control device to control Walters machine that was in The Kroogs possession.  People don't think that way, so it is unnatural, and takes the reader out of "living in the story"  I have always hated that tool that comic book authors use.  Jet throws The Kroog time travellers out of their time machine and takes it to Space at a time before The Earth was formed (albeit so that they will never build it, because they wont find it when they find Walters, because Jet also has removed Walters machine, ostensibly after he built it, but before they first came upon it. But all that is not explained in a satisfactory  and understandable manner in the storys text.  Jet seals Walters original machine in one of Jets secret laboratories (so he can use it in the future).  Of course the time-travelling Kroog are left to their seemingly horrible fate in Earths Cretaceous period.  This story basic plotline could be changed to something really good IF it were given an entire book for Episode 1, and an entire series to relate the entire time travelling saga of "Jet Powers Time Traveller".  As usual, a comic book Sci-Fi story has not only not enough space to develop a setting, the main characters, an adequate plot line, proper pacing, and even to get the right balance of narrative text, speech balloons, and what is pictured in panels. so the scope of the story must be chopped down to almost nothing, and there is no room to tell a coherent story (and no room to explain even the most important scientific aspects.

I had to deal with some of this plotlines issues regarding travelling into the past to keep bad-spirited or selfishly ignorant time travellers from ruining The Earths present in several different dimensions, by undoing events which had occurred in the past.  All in all, this story, despite its ridiculous improbability, has been the most interesting to me, so far, of the two Jet Powers books.

The House of Horror
So, Su Shan was still a prisoner, and still considers herself an enemy of Jet Powers (apparently thinking he might turn her over to US Government authorities because she had worked for the avowed enemy of The USA, Dr. Sinn.  While Jet is time travelling, she steals one of his cars, and drives through the desert towards the coastal cities (probably of California).  She stops at a roadside diner, and finds that her money has turned to white powder.  Isn't that the wrong direction? Isn't it that white powder turns into lots of money when sold to drug addicts?  And, of course, we have the old comic book habit of giving the evil villain two tufts of hair sticking upward on opposite sides of his head, to mimic The Devils horns!  And the author makes the mistake of having Su Shan tell the readers what they are seeing in the panels drawing, that the villain is making her unconscious by covering her mouth and nose with a chloroform rag.  Young children might not know what the asphyxiation drug is, but they know her breathing is being stopped, and she will be unconscious.  She is saying "Chloroform!  Drugging me!" , as if talking directly  to the reader.  If one insists on making sure the youngest readers wont miss what is happening, he should have her speak to the villain, saying "Don't knock me out!"  The villain has invented a ray that dissolves paper!  Humans have known since paper was invented, that fire will consume it very quickly.  So, if the villain breaks into building where the object paper (money or valuable books are stored) he could just set the object aflame with a cigarette lighter.  So, why would months or years developing such a weapon be worth having done?  This seems a bit far-fetched.  The villain has a castle-like home, complete with a dungeon for prisoners in an area south of San Bernardino, California???  It looks to be from Medieval times.  Yet, the oldest Spanish buildings from the 1700s were made of baked clay (adobe), not stones.  This nasty crook must have used some of his extortion gains to import a castle , stone by stone, from Europe, or the countries of the former Crusader States.  It even has a portcullis with sharp metal teeth, when lowered quickly could kill people entering below.  Su Shan ends up kissing Jet, and needing to think that the man who pushed her out of his space vehicle to a many thousands of feet drop, and certain death, wouldnt have risked his life to save her, like Jet did!  Do people really think like that.  Do they need to hear in their minds ear what they already know very well???  I think these comic book cliches are so unnatural.  They make it really difficult for me to stay in the story.  They make every story "camp" and a parody/comedy that cannot be taken even slightly seriously.

Space Ace - The Invisible Death
I had hoped this episode of "Space Ace" would be a LOT better than the one that appeared in Jet Powers 1.  At least, the artwork is better than that of The "Space Ace" episode in Jet Power1.  Saturns moon, Titan is very far from our Sun.  Saturn is gas planet covered in ice.  What heat source does Titan have that keeps it ice free?  We even see tropical palm trees growing there.  I suppose it was figured by the author to be vulcanism hinted at by the actions that produce the boulders being shot into the air from pressure caused by the volcanic gasses being forced upward.  The authors explanation that a tiny aircraft passing over the fault line or gas fissure "causes pressure to build up and force boulders to shoot upward instantly (so quickly that they actually hit the tiny air vehicle) is utterly ridiculous.  No one in his or her right mind would believe that a tiny vehicle passing overhead could affect what happens deep under the ground below.  And even if such a ridiculous, impossible event somehow could happen, by the time the pressure would build up and the gasses underground could react, the aircraft would have long passed the place where the rocks were shooting up (even if it were several miles wide).  Even at the age of 5 or six, I would not have believed something so absurd. 

The WORST thing about this result of laziness by the author to not research, or, at least do any deep thinking to find a better reason for the rocks to fly up, is that would not have been a problem to use the flying rocks as a danger to the spacecraft.  It is just the ridiculous explanation that ruins everything.  I would have just had a circular ring of active volcanic mountains surrounding The Ocean of Diamonds, whose constant volcanic activity causes pressure building up to shoot the boulders upward in different areas of those mountains, so one never knows, ahead of time, where along the ring the rocks will be flying.  So one has to be lucky that they are not flying just as the crossing over is attempted.  There is no approach route that is guaranteed to be safe.  We would still have Aces aircraft hit and disabled, without having the logical little readers throw the book down in disgust over the ridiculous explanation, and jump all over it, angry at having their intelligence insulted.  This kind of laziness and lack of respect for the readers is what bothers me about so many superhero stories.  It is even more insulting than stating that X event happened by saying a magic word.  Even at the age of 3 and 4, I didnt enjoy stories about magic.  I wanted to know why things happen and how they work, or how they came to be.

Ace and Storm (his female sidekick) find pure water to drink, and Ace kills a condorlike bird using Storms belt like a slingshot flinging a rock.  The condor bursts into flames with seemingly now heat source, and is burnt up.  Ace surmises the cause was that the land there is radioactive, and sending out infra-red rays.  Amateur geologist, Ace notices that there is a lot of lead in the nearby rocks.  He builds a brushfire and melts the lead, and covers their cloaks with it.  If all this isn't unbelievable enough, the cloaks only cover part of their backsides,  Their faces, arms, hands, and Aces legs are all exposed to the deadly infra-red rays that killed ALL the previous visitors to the Diamond Ocean.  Our protagonist is a criminal, who decides to sell the idea of erecting infra-red barriers to protect all the space ports from pirate raids, and ask only that he be pardoned for his former crimes.  What a man!!!  We can be very proud of him.  We hope our children who read his stories will pattern their life after his stellar example!   

The Metal Monsters
The gamma rays from the fallout of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima(o) and Nagasaki, at the end of World War II, caused a metal testing machine to come to life.  It (he) travelled north to much less populated Hokkaido, to get away from Humans.  After 6 years of a lonely life, the robotlike machine found Mr. Sinn, who had washed ashore after his satellite ball crashed.  Mr. Sinn installs a mechanism for the robot to talk, and trains him to help him repair his machines from his crashed "moon ball".  Then he builds many more "living robots" by exposing ordinary metals to the rays emanating from the living robots radioactive metal.  (about as ridiculous as an explanation from "Space Ace", or the gamma rays from the bomb bringing the first robot to life.  Soon, when he has built a decent-sized army, Sinn has them raiding northern island villages to get all he needs.  Sinn hears about Jet Powers hiding a time machine, and wants to steal it.  His robots build a navy of rocket-powered small boats, and head across The Pacific Ocean towards California.  They land and march inland.  In his laboratory on a mesa in the desert east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Jet watches Sinns Robot army march across Yosemite Park, and reach the eastern side.  He sends flying saucers over the robots dropping large ringed magnets to trap them.  I wonder how he knew that there was a reasonably large iron content in the Robots metal? As they approach Jets mesa, the robots jam the air waves to prevent Jet from calling for help.  Jet sends out X-Rays towards The Robots to change their metal to "Idium".  All The Robots stop moving and fall, lifeless (killed by the same atomic rays that gave them life).  Only one is left, but he is really Sinn, inside an outward shell of his robots, like a suit of armour.  Jet knocks Sinn over and the heavy metal makes him hit the hard floor, knocking him unconscious.  He is taken to prison.  This story has an interesting basic plot (which now could be worked without the silly false science).  The villain could simply make an army of artificially intelligent robots, who would not be as dextrous or as intelligent as those in this story.  But, based on the incredibly fast exponential improvement of artificial intelligence over the past few years, projecting out that trend, The Robots could be expected to eventually reach the fringes of becoming sentient and self aware.  I would like this story produced without using the non-scientific total fantasy elements, but otherwise, having a fairly similar plot.

Overall book:  Issue #2 seems to be a little better than Issue #1 in colouring, artwork, and entertainment level of the stories.  I like it much better than the total fantasy with almost no real science of the late 1930s and early 1940s Space fantasy genre books.  But, I still think its basic good story ideas could be handled in a more clever way.

[Captain Audio]

  This seems a bit far-fetched.  The villain has a castle-like home, complete with a dungeon for prisoners in an area south of San Bernardino, California???  It looks to be from Medieval times.  Yet, the oldest Spanish buildings from the 1700s were made of baked clay (adobe), not stones.

California has many castles, most built by wealthy eccentrics in the 19th century into the early 20th century and some in the 21st century.

The Spanish did build adobe military buildings but they also built castle like stone fortresses near harbors and rivers that needed guarding against possible invaders.
They used whatever local stone they could find that was suitable but if none was suitable they could import ship loads of more suitable stone blocks.
I've visited Castillo de San Marcos in Florida. The massive citadel is made of Coquina a local aggregate stone composed of seashells dissolved by carbonic acid laden rain water after the last ice age that resolidified into a strong cacium carbonate material strong enough to withstand cannon fire.
Not certain but I think this same stone was found on the west coast as well.

[K1ngcat]

Well, Robb, I tried to give you a way out, but you went ahead and wrote a review anyway! So here's my take on it.

In The Three Million Year Old Men, it's interesting that Su Shan seems to be on better terms with Jet now. But let's face it he's a big improvement on Mr Sinn. What exactly was the nature of her relationship with that nasty little bugger anyway? Had he saved her life and she felt obligated to him? Was she a servant, a consort, a relation? And let's not forget this adventure would never have taken place if Jet hadn't happened to discover the Booths staggering across the desert sands, and that was just pure luck.

Ezra Walters gets his comeuppance from the Kroog, who dispose of him in the same way that all thoughtless super villains polish off people they have reason to be grateful to. At least he would've got a statue if their plans had succeeded. Jet has to track them down, and his visiscreen, which can implausibly see anywhere in the world as well as 100 years into the past and 500 years into the future, still cannot help him. So he has to do it the hard way and get Walters' original time machine and go look for them IN TIME!

Now I don't think that Jet implies he's literally covered ALL of time in his search, as he says he's just been stopping off at various intervals in history, but he thinks he's beaten until he remembers Ezra's Electronibeam Control. Then he has to go off and build one of his own, which he can do easily because he's a Captain of Science, before he can take remote control of the Kroogs' copied time machines. Once he catches up with them, he has to use some muscle to disable their guards so he can send their machines off to burn up in a Big Bang, leaving them stranded in the past at the mercy of the dinosaurs. Of course this is really an act of genocide but we'll turn a blind eye to that because the Kroog are very bad.

Now I've searched several times for the giant unnatural thought balloon where Jet thinks about how he built his own time machine and I'm sorry, Robb, I just can't find it. I can find a lot of examples where Jet talks to himself about what he's doing, or going to do, and they're not totally realistic either, but they do advance the plot, and time, as it were, is of the essence as Jet only has ten pages to save the earth. I don't see him with a thought balloon until he's about to knock out the first Kroog guard, and if he'd said that out loud he would have lost the element of surprise. The only alternative to his soliloquies would be a caption box for every panel to explain the hero's actions.

Jet takes ALL the Kroog machines out to burn in pre-history - does this mean they will no longer exist in the future, and that they will never be built in the first place, because the Kroog who would have built them have died before they can discover the first one? Or is the author simply looking at time in a linear fashion to avoid having to explain a temporal paradox in the space of three panels? I'm not sure, Lord knows I've come across a few plot holes in Dr Who episodes which are exciting and advance the story until you stop and think about them afterwards. All I know is Jet's response to his Kroog problem was enough to satisfy an 11 year old comic reader, and that's probably all that was required, excuse the saying, "at the time." I'm inclined to subscribe to the theory that if you question a story too much while it's in progress, you lose the opportunity to feel involved in the adventure.

In The House of Horrors, Su Shan obviously isn't certain of how Jet will treat her, so while he's away searching for the Kroog she "takes a powder." Unfortunately the powder used to be the money in her wallet, so she falls into the hands of the devilish Mr Tufty. Why he'd choose such a deserted location to test his paper-to-powder machine is uncertain, as there's no sign of paper in the vicinity ( unless it's all been turned already.) Surely Su Shan's arrival gives him an ideal opportunity to test it on the contents of her purse? However,  he decides she must be done away with. I don't really object to the thought balloon, as he chloroforms her.  She realises how she's being drugged, and with what, but she can't cry out as he has the rag over her mouth. The only alternative again would seem to be a caption box for the panel saying, "to keep Su Shan quiet, the evil inventor drugs her with a rag soaked in chloroform."

Anyhow, it turns out that  Jet was keeping an eye on her all along - he plainly wasn't sure of her intentions. But now it's to her advantage as he's able to come to her rescue. I'm a bit confused as to where, though. Marlon Stone seems to be keeping her prisoner in a stone-walled laboratory with a winding staircase, but Jet traces her to a low, sprawling mansion with a metal hallway, where Stone keeps a room full of gorillas. He must keep them in very poor conditions as they're not normally aggressive, but these are intent on tearing Jet apart. Su Shan has an epiphany as she realises that Jet's risking death to rescue her, something Mr Sinn would've never have done.  It may seem to be a cliche, but given the hysterical, sobbing state she's in, facing her own death as well as Jet's, it's not entirely surprising that she's talking to herself.  We can only imagine how harrowing her life's been like up to this moment, in Sinn's "care." So I'm inclined to take it on face value. When she kisses Jet in relief and gratitude I'm more surprised by his childish reaction. Has he spent so long surrounded by test tubes that he's never even been kissed?

In The Metal Monsters, a machine comes to life after absorbing radiation, and after years of hiding in isolation it's discovered by Mr Sinn when his metal moon crashes. He then teaches the machine to talk, and to help him build a workshop from materials salvaged from the wrecked moon, which are amazingly not ruined by submersion in sea water. Then he finds that he can make other metals equally sentient by exposing them to the living machine, and sets about creating a robot army to destroy Jet Powers. Yes, it's all impossible rubbish, but if you don't go along with it you're not going to have the adventure. I think you have to consider the dramatic appeal of the impossible to the average comic reading kid, at least in the days when this was written, and I was reading it.

Things are different now, I think comics are meant to appeal more to the adolescent and young adult male. So I'm sure you could replace the living metal with artificially intelligent robots, make Su Shan less histrionic, make things cleverer, more realistic and less clich?d, but you couldn't use Mr Sinn as he is here. Because the big shocker in this story is that Sinn's skin isn't green after all. He's an ordinary yellow-peril villain like Fu Man Chu. Maybe he was in bad lighting before? But now he's a negative racial stereotype and an anachronism so he's totally off limits.

Robb, I get all your comments, or at least I think I do, and forgive me if I'm wrong. Yes it could all be cleverer, more realistic, less clich?d, with real science and not science fantasy. But would an 11 year old me still want to read it?

One of the things I like about CB+ is that the comics on it were written for kids. There's had no pretention of being "art",  they were just for entertainment, as disposable as a polystyrene cup, and therein lies their charm. When the UK comic 2000 AD was first introduced, and I was in my mid thirties, part of its appeal to me was that it was still designed to be enjoyed by children, full of useful advice like "don't try this at home." Over the years I saw it decline into a dark pit suitable only for introverted adolescent computer game addicts, and it saddened me to see the fun go out of it.  The thing I like about Jet Powers is that he still speaks to the 11-year-old inside me. Oh, plus the art is still really cool!

I hope you can see where I'm coming from. You and I want rather different things from our comics, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on some points. Sorry to keep you waiting so long for a reply. I wish you good luck with your bumbling professor robot story, it does sound interesting.

BTW, I didn't bother to deal with Space Ace as it was dreck then, let alone now, and I thought I'd taken up enough space already!
All the best
K1ngcat

[Robb_K]

Well, Robb, I tried to give you a way out, but you went ahead and wrote a review anyway! So here's my take on it.

Robb, I get all your comments, or at least I think I do, and forgive me if I'm wrong. Yes it could all be cleverer, more realistic, less clich?d, with real science and not science fantasy. But would an 11 year old me still want to read it?

One of the things I like about CB+ is that the comics on it were written for kids. There's had no pretention of being "art",  they were just for entertainment, as disposable as a polystyrene cup, and therein lies their charm.  The thing I like about Jet Powers is that he still speaks to the 11-year-old inside me. Oh, plus the art is still really cool!

I hope you can see where I'm coming from. You and I want rather different things from our comics, I think we'll have to agree to disagree on some points. Sorry to keep you waiting so long for a reply. I wish you good luck with your bumbling professor robot story, it does sound interesting.

All the best
K1ngcat 

Thanks for your comments, Kingcat.

Yes, I think you understand what I meant in my comments.  I think I, and my fellow adult Ultra-Barks fans (who think of him as a "god", and worship his work) had a different attitude towards his comic book stories than most kids did to comic book stories in general.  And so, it seems that they wanted something different from comic books than the average young child reader.  While it was an escape to a beautiful Wonderland, it was also the source of a lot of their learning; so I think that I and they wanted to learn more about the real World because of that, and tied together learning about The Real World in their comics as well as outside of comics.  And so they didn't want comic book panel space wasted on totally made - up (e.g. "magic") explanations for events that occur in their comic book stories.  My parents and grandparents (who resided in our home), and uncles and aunts(who lived above us, or next door) used to read my older cousins comic books to me, from the ages of 2 through 4 or 5.  From the age of 3, I would read the stories to them, and they would help me.  I would ask questions about what I did not know.  We would stop at those points, and they would explain to me in words, but also showing me pictures of the real things in encyclopedias, magazines, the World Globe, or an Atlas.  And, after that we could still return to the story and move on, and I could get right back into it, and the pause would not ruin my enjoyment.  Later, reading on my own, I would use a dictionary to learn words I did not know, and also look up other unknown things in the encyclopedia and atlas.  So, it seems. that we Barks worshippers had a different goal in our main reasons for reading comic books from very early.  To us, coming across anything in stories that made no sense, would make us stop reading to think about that, and take us out of the flow of the story, and keep us from "living in it" (e.g. experiencing it as if we were really experiencing it ourselves).  As I seem to understand it, you and most child readers ALSO were "living in the stories" as you read them, and simply threw off (paid no attention to) the fact that what was shown or happening in the story was impossible.  Often, that actually was one of its features you liked most, and sought after in your reading them.  So I think you were correct in surmising that we looked for different things in our comics reading.  And I think that that was not only true when we were adolescents and adults, but when we were children, as well.  I may not have been worshipping excellent drawing technique, realistic and bright colouring, and ability in stylisation and artistic flair during my earliest years, but soon learned to appreciate it (while still a fairly young child).

[The Australian Panther]

Excellent observations Robb. I don't worship anyone as a God. But I do revere Barks. For me Barks and Jack Kirby are on the same level as creators and storytellers. As are Chester Gould, Lee Falk and Floyd Gottfredson.
Even as a child, the fantasy I read had to have characters who were identifiable, resolutions to stories that were satisfying, and 'universes' that were internally logical. [And good art! if they were comic books. ] 
As I got older, I read a lot of science fiction. I soon realized that far from a form of escapism, the best writers dealt with meaningful real world issues by placing them in entirely different contexts or looking at them in surprising contexts. [So, Theodore Sturgeon, Issac Asimov, Fredrick Brown, Frank Herbert], for a few.
I have read all the Tarzan books with the exception of the one by Fritz Leiber. They work because of their internal logic. As do Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's 'Alice' stories 
There has to be a framework in a story or a fantasy 'universe' that makes sense and holds it together.
Unfortunately that is not true for much of what is currently written in the 'Universes' of Superhero stories.
But that is another post.
As I have gotten older, the wizard behind the curtain has become more obvious to me, and when I can see multiple logical holes in a story, I don't enjoy it.
Cheers!                   

[Robb_K]

Excellent observations Robb. I don't worship anyone as a God. But I do revere Barks. For me Barks and Jack Kirby are on the same level as creators and storytellers. As are Chester Gould, Lee Falk and Floyd Gottfredson.
Even as a child, the fantasy I read had to have characters who were identifiable, resolutions to stories that were satisfying, and 'universes' that were internally logical. [And good art! if they were comic books. ] 
As I got older, I read a lot of science fiction. I soon realized that far from a form of escapism, the best writers dealt with meaningful real world issues by placing them in entirely different contexts or looking at them in surprising contexts. [So, Theodore Sturgeon, Issac Asimov, Fredrick Brown, Frank Herbert], for a few.
I have read all the Tarzan books with the exception of the one by Fritz Leiber. They work because of their internal logic. As do Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's 'Alice' stories 
There has to be a framework in a story or a fantasy 'universe' that makes sense and holds it together.
Unfortunately that is not true for much of what is currently written in the 'Universes' of Superhero stories.
But that is another post.
As I have gotten older, the wizard behind the curtain has become more obvious to me, and when I can see multiple logical holes in a story, I don't enjoy it.
Cheers!     

Excellent points.  You have added the points that I forgot to make to complete my major points.  Realism with The Real World is NOT necessary, IF the rules of the fantasy World relaid out, and story events and things that exist in them are consistent within those rules, and are logical based on them.  Deviating from them once they are established, will certainly keep a story from working, an, thus, keep the reader from enjoying it fully (e.g. forcing enjoyment downward only to those elements that work (i.e. great artwork, or great action, or great characterization, despite the plot not working).