I have long considered the cover of Strange Adventures 148 (Jan. 1963), to exemplify the title’s theme under editor Julius Schwartz.
The raison d’ê·tre of Schwartz’s other science fiction title Mystery in Space is advertised in its name, but Strange Adventures covered other ground, with colorful, outré adventures set against the ordinary background of contemporary Earth.
Superhero stories also supplied that same satisfying contrast, but Schwartz’s protagonists in Strange Adventures weren’t superheroes.
“Several of the stories in Strange Adventures were about daily life on contemporary Earth, which was transformed by some mysterious sf event,” noted comics historian Michael E. Grost. “The setting of the tales was often domestic, showing a typical home of the era, or set in the heroes’ everyday job. There is often considerable quiet comedy, showing daily scenes transformed in a surrealistic fashion.”
Here, a postal carrier, kidnapped by alien invaders, manages to stop them from stealing Earth’s water, even as an elementary school history class watches the proceedings on a monitor in 2956.
“A beautifully crafted cover by Murphy Anderson, one of my favorites of the era, not least because it was so different from the norm,” recalled comics historian Keith W. Williams. “A calm, quiet scene, set in a schoolroom, with no monsters, no rampaging giants, no super-villains, no dinosaurs, no gorillas… Admittedly there were aliens involved, but hidden from sight within a discreet little flying saucer. Just an intriguing bit of mystery. How would this unprepossessing, mild-looking postman succeed in repelling an alien invasion all by himself? There was, it turned out, a reasonable answer, and a pleasingly unexpected denouement to the tale. … But I doubt that I’d have cared if there were nothing to the story at all, as my imagination had been captured by that cover, and I could happily dream up my own visions of what might lie behind it.”
With characteristic optimism, the story by artist Gil Kane and writer Gardner Fox ends up with Earth’s water supply being protected even as the water-starved alien invaders get what they need to survive.
The story has a satisfying circularity — we finally learn that the far-future students who are watching the events unfold through their “tele-timer” attend a school named for that heroic postal carrier, Calvin Jackson.
“The Silver Age sf comic book is a missing link in popular culture. Its ideas about sf used to be available to everyone in society, being sold in every supermarket and pharmacy,” Grost wrote. “These ideas are very rich. One could argue that they are more imaginative than anything in prose science fiction on the one hand, or in film and TV sf on the other.”
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