Review of DC Showcase Strange Adventures -- Sheesh!

Other than the old EC horror titles, I have little interest in reading comics from the 1950s. I've never been into superheroes, I never liked stories that treated their readers like children (even if they were children), and, well, the 1950s just don't particularly interest me. The 1940s? Now that was a decade, awful and interesting. And lots of adventure in the 1930s. But the '50s were mostly boring.

However, when I saw that DC had published a DC Showcase collection of 1950s science fiction title Strange Adventures, I bought it with the hope that I could at least enjoy some cheesy space opera. I also figured it would be nice to take a break from time to time from the mammoth history book I'm reading (waaay too much about the Prussian "Fredericks," frankly).

So, a couple Strange Adventures stories before I turn off the light and go to sleep. It was a good plan.

There's no nice way to say this: The stories are terrible. Though the art is actually quite nice, the stories show an absolute ignorance of science, bad plotting, silly motivations, and an eight-year-old's view that every antagonist has to be out to take over the world. (That laboratory ape that just gained super intelligence? He's out to take over the earth. Those Martians who just landed? Wanna take over the earth.) Frankly, it's rather painful to read. Thank goodness James Warren came along and realized he could escape the comics code by publishing magazines instead of comic books.

Sheesh. Seriously, just "sheesh." This book sort of saps your love for life.

UPDATE: Maggwire's Partners

Three days ago, I wrote a short notice here about Maggwire, an aggregator of magazine article links in an easy-to-maneuver format. I noted that it was an interesting site but still had room to grow, and I pointed out that the Comics and Sci Fi category only included three magazines and was in fact dominated by the British title Sci Fi Now.

Maggwire co-founder Jian Chai left a comment on that post, in which he noted "... we are working hard on making this category better. Soon we will have articles from Starlog and Fangoria. We will also look into The Comics Journal and Cinefantastique soon."

"Soon" is right! Just a few days later, and the Comics and Sci Fi section includes quite a number of articles from Fangoria, and Total Film and Empire are also represented. It's nice to see that Maggwire is developing so rapidly -- not just in my geeky science-fiction category, either. I didn't see links to foreign-language publications, but that may not be part of their plan (you gotta start with one language, after all); however, that might be a natural way to expand further once they've established themselves.

Anyway, nice work.