[MarkWarner]

Last week's choice was a massive Reading Group HIT!!!! I am not so sure what will happen with this week's book. I thought about another Sci-fi and then was tempted by a Western ... so inspiration struck and we have Space Western #40.

Here is the link https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=21689 and we are concentrating on the first story "The Saucer Men".

Of course, if like me you read the book choices cover to cover, feel free to comment on whatever you like.

I am really not sure what to expect from this. The whole concept seems very strange and summat that Ed Wood might have dreamt up.

[SuperScrounge]

Migration to the Moon - Okay little filler.

The Saucer Men - ummm... yeah... Okay, it wasn't terrible. I wouldn't even call it bad, it was just... there.

I was amazed the writer understood that Mars would have a lower atmospheric pressure, shame the artist didn't seem to understand that when he drew those open suits the Martians wore on Earth (or should we assume it was a transparent fabric?)

Of course, once on Mars atmospheric was completely forgotten. Oddly enough the writer didn't seem to know about the gravitational differences between the two planets, usually the parlor trick for such stories.

Martians are such a trusting species. Korok brings some Earthlings to Mars and everyone just accepts this as proof of conquest. Bwuh? 'Look, I have Earthlings!' 'All hail, King Korok.' Yeesh!

Found this bit of dialogue amusing. "No queen is going to be dethroned while I'm toting a pair of six guns!"
Yeahhhhhhh, because America got its start defending monarchies. 

The Outlaws of the Desert - A much more entertaining story.

Incident at Powder River - Amusing little tale.

The Moon Monsters - Odd little story. I think the writer gave it just enough effort to get paid.

Death From U-235 - Starts off interesting, but then becomes pure fantasy once they get to Venus.

The Mystery of the Indian Hills - Not bad, Strong bow comes off smarter than he did at the beginning of the first story.

How a Visitor from Space Won the Great West for America! - Confusing. Tecumseh uses the appearance of a comet to unite Indians tribes, but then the last panel says, "Without Tecumseh" errr, what happened to him?

[Lorendiac]

Martians are such a trusting species. Korok brings some Earthlings to Mars and everyone just accepts this as proof of conquest. Bwuh? 'Look, I have Earthlings!' 'All hail, King Korok.' Yeesh!

Found this bit of dialogue amusing. "No queen is going to be dethroned while I'm toting a pair of six guns!"
Yeahhhhhhh, because America got its start defending monarchies. 

I found myself forming a theory about all this. Here's my reconstruction of what had been going on behind the scenes:

Once upon a time there was a Martian civilization afflicted with a mentally unstable Queen. You never knew what her mood swings would cause her to do next, without rhyme or reason. Unfortunately, the Martians didn't have any legally established method for "impeaching" her because of medical inability to reliably perform the duties of her office. Nonetheless, Korok, being a true patriot, wanted to unseat this terribly unfit monarch with as little fuss as possible. One day, in yet another of her wild mood swings, she conceded (in front of witnesses) that the man who conquered Planet Earth would "deserve" to run Mars too, forming a two-planet Empire with himself at the head.

Korok, being a humanitarian as well as a patriot, wanted to find a way to exploit this opening and get her into "honorable retirement" with an absolute minimum of bloodshed. So he flew to Earth, rounded up a few cowboys without doing them any harm, and flew back to Mars. No one had died; no one needed to; but he knew the Queen was so crazy and gullible that she was highly likely to accept these "trophies of our recent conquest" as being "solid proof" of his achievement. (That sort of thing was exactly why she needed to be nudged off the throne as quickly as possible.)

Unfortunately, the American "trophies," being absolute suckers for a pretty face, never even considered the possibility that getting Queen Thula dethroned as quickly as possible might be the best outcome for all concerned (including herself, even if she didn't realize it). Without knowing anything about the rights or wrongs of the situation, they blundered in, started shooting, and ended up ruining Korok's attempt to have a bloodless regime change.

A moment later, Queen Thula's mental instability was highlighted once again when she spontaneously made Spurs Jackson her new Prime Minister. She apparently felt that defeating a man with a bullwhip is the best possible proof that you have all the necessary political and administrative skills to know how to run an entire planet! (No sane ruler would ever have made that assumption.)

P.S. Here's something on the inside of the front cover that made me wince. Caption: "When rockets have achieved a speed of seven miles per second they will exceed the velocity necessary to escape the Earth's gravity." I was thinking, "No, no, no, no!"

A few years before this comic book was published, Robert A. Heinlein had some of his characters address that very point in a bull session in the novel "Rocket Ship Galileo." I think the basic point went this way (but not in these words): "Seven miles per second" is only what it would take to get you out of Earth's gravity well if you acquired that velocity all at once as a result of a single huge explosion -- as if your spaceship were basically a very large bullet being fired out of the barrel of an incredibly large "gun," and then the momentum from that one explosion was all you had going for you in your attempt to get far, far away from Earth so that its gravity didn't pull you right back down.

But if your ship had a built-in rocket engine with a huge fuel supply available, with constant combustion as you fight your way out of the atmosphere and so forth, then you wouldn't need to be moving upward at anywhere near "seven miles per second." You would only need to have a constant acceleration which was at least a little bit more than 9.8 meters per second squared. That would keep you getting further and further away from ground level, second by second, until you were so far away from Earth that its gravity was no longer a major concern. One of Heinlein's character referred to this as a case of people getting confused about the difference between rockety and ballistics.

[crashryan]

I started off thinking this concept would be more fun than it proved to be. All the stories are rather confusing. The art might have helped in some places, but unfortunately it was confusing too. Interesting to note that Spurs Jackson was created and written by Walter Gibson, famous for his countless Shadow pulp stories. It goes to show you can't win 'em all.

The lead story is the most readable, which isn't saying much. There are good touches. I like how the Martian instantly becomes an expert roper thanks to his superior intelligence. The author provides satisfactory excuses for the cowboys to use their Western skills. But the business of Korok winning the throne by showing off a few earthmen is pretty lame. As much as I like Lorendiac's deconstruction of the Queen's mental state, I'm afraid Spurs is simply following Human Intervention Rule #1: in a choice between a beautiful half-dressed woman and an ugly guy with bad teeth, the woman is always the Good Guy.

The entire enterprise doesn't seem to have been thought through. Is it a space series featuring cowboys or a Western series with science-fiction elements? Is it set in the present or the future? Is it to be told in the third person or the first? Then there's the way Spurs becomes co-ruler of Mars at the end of the first story, only to have the gimmick deep-sixed in the opening caption of "Death by U-235." It seems as if Gibson originally intended the cowboys should stay on Mars to use their Western skills in a Flash Gordon setting. It also seems like Spurs was supposed to wear his space outfit as a permanent costume; however it too is dumped in the second story.

I'm surprised an old hand like Gibson didn't put more effort into introducing his heroes. Though Strong Bow proves in later stories to be the smartest of the bunch, his big entrance is tossing a ringer at horseshoes. Official sidekick Hank opens the story but isn't named until the second page. John Belfi doesn't help. He uses too many long shots and backs of heads. We get only one clear close-up of Spurs. This trend hits bottom in the Strong Bow story (which I admit was probably drawn by someone else). The star of the show almost never faces the camera.

Finally I must mention "Death by U-235." I've read this through four times and for the life of me it seems to say that Spurs and Hank fly those stupid mechanical horses back from Venus without benefit of spacesuits. What's more, Spurs then flies one back to Venus, recovers some valuable papers, then returns to earth in the crashed spaceship--all in a single caption, accompanying an action shot of Spurs that has nothing to do with the story. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Could the flying horses have been intended as permanent props? We'll never know. The next issue seems to have been written by another author. Belfi is limited to filler stories and the lead is taken over by Stan Campbell and his drawer full of Alex Raymond swipes. Issue 2 reshapes the series again, giving it a military slant that continues over the remainder of the run.

A mess, all told. Too bad. By the way, doesn't it look as though Strong Bow's first name has been relettered, as if his name were changed at the last moment?

[SuperScrounge]

Lorendiac, I like that backstory! 

[paw broon]

Seems to me that Korok is a typical, nasty, power seeker.  I don't see anything else in the story to make me think otherwise.
When I read what we were getting this week, my initial thought was it would be a sort of early version of Cowboys and Aliens and when the saucers appeared, I was still looking forward to the rest.  How quickly that anticipation changed to disappointment.  Not only because of the science flaws, but the art work is poor.  Some of the heads are well out of proportion.
Was it not awful obvious that the footering about with old fashioned weapons at the start ade it a certainty that they would be used to advantage later on? 
I understand thet the scientific nonsense is not unusual in comics, books and pulps.  Look at Captain Future, for instance.  But the martians are the big bulky blokes - it should be the other way round so that the earthmen, when they get to Mars, should be faster and stronger than the locals.
The other Spurs story is really daft. Perhaps I'm missing something because I can't figure out how Spurs knew they were being sent to Venus.  But then, I had stopped paying much attention by this point.  And as for flying those robot bird things back to Earth - 'nuff said, eh?
A small point here about the "fact" bit and ships leaving Earth, I notice that the artist shows rockety style ships blasting off but in space, they are drawn with stubby wings which are totally useless in airless space. Were they supposed to be retractable wings for landing in a rocky planet, they wouldn't have been out in space. 
As for escape velocity, a vehicle leaving Earth, whether by continuous acceleration or anything else in current science, still needs to achieve that crucial speed or it wont escape gravity's pull and will simply go into orbit.  I think.
All in all, not a very good piece of entertainment.

[bowers]

I really don't know quite what to say about this book. If I had to give a one-word opinion of this week's selection, it would be "confusing". While I enjoy both western and sci-fi comics I'm not so sure they can be easily melded into a single entity. It might have made more sense for Spurs to remain on Mars, as Crash suggested, and probably would have made a more readable series. Heck, he never even got to use his plutonium gun with the mini-atom bomb ammo! Unfortunately, we were returned to Earth and subjected to the likes of Big Sam and his annoying faux-western dialogue-  "Yew been a-shootin off yore mouth 'bout whut yuh'd do if'n we wuz tuh meet..." While not being one to let science stand in the way of a rousing tale,  I had to draw the line at interplanetary travel via a mechanical winged horse and no protective gear or navigational aids. On page 6, the lower left panel seemed to show the gents had gotten rid of their air helmets so they could don their hats for the ride home! If anyone is interested, another cowboy vs. alien story appears in Buster Crabbe 9 (available onsite), and is only marginally better. Oops, looks like my zuba has expired! Cheers, Bowers

[narfstar]

This was a surprisingly childish story. It was goofy. It was so goofy I could enjoy it. Not something I would enjoy over and over but just on its own it was fun.

[Lorendiac]

Seems to me that Korok is a typical, nasty, power seeker.  I don't see anything else in the story to make me think otherwise.

I agree he was power-hungry and had an abrasive manner. None of which contradicts my theory that he wouldn't be trying to stage a bloodless coup against the Queen (by pretending to have conquered Earth) if the Queen were not painfully incompetent in her capacity as ruler of a planetary civilization. 

You might say that my basic point is that since anyone in his right mind could see Thula had no business running anything, we should give Korok the benefit of a reasonable doubt regarding the possibility that he had quite justifiably concluded that Mars desperately needed new leadership, and thus he tried hard to find a way to trigger a change of power without murdering anyone if at all possible. After all, he wasn't trying to assassinate her.

As for escape velocity, a vehicle leaving Earth, whether by continuous acceleration or anything else in current science, still needs to achieve that crucial speed or it wont escape gravity's pull and will simply go into orbit.  I think.

No, there's nothing "magic" about the "seven miles per second number." A modern Space Shuttle does not need to move that fast on its way up through the atmosphere.

But I did poke around online, looking for other discussions of the old "seven miles per second" myth, and I found one place where someone said approximately the following: If you're going to boost a ship out of Earth's gravity well, you need to expend energy equivalent to what it would have taken to give that ship, all at once, an upwards velocity of seven miles per second. You could apply that energy all at once in a single burst of acceleration (as in Jules Verne's old novel "From the Earth to the Moon") -- or you could apply it with slower acceleration over a much longer period than a single second -- but for all practical purposes, the total cost is much the same. If you don't expend enough energy, the ship will just fall back to Earth . . . sooner or later.

[paw broon]

I suppose we are getting a bit off topic here but I am interested in this escape velocity stuff.  So, here's a definition from the ESA site:-

"Escape velocity

The minimum speed needed to escape the gravitational attraction of a celestial body and enter space. Earth's escape velocity is 11.2 km/s."

And here's a section for kids:-
http://www.esa.int/esaKIDSen/SEMQ3VXDE2E_Liftoff_0.html

[Lorendiac]

I suppose we are getting a bit off topic here but I am interested in this escape velocity stuff.  So, here's a definition from the ESA site:-

"Escape velocity

The minimum speed needed to escape the gravitational attraction of a celestial body and enter space. Earth's escape velocity is 11.2 km/s."

And here's a section for kids:-
http://www.esa.int/esaKIDSen/SEMQ3VXDE2E_Liftoff_0.html

I followed your link to the section for kids. One paragraph says:

If a player could throw the ball hard enough so that it reaches the necessary velocity, the ball would go into orbit. It would never fall back to Earth. Throw it harder still, so that it reaches a speed of 11.2 km/s (40,300 km/h)

[MarkWarner]

Ok I am really late finishing this one .. been a busy old week.

Well, after finishing the first story I was pleasantly surprised. It had a real 1930's cliffhanger feel, reminded me of Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon. A nice bit of dialogue