Number 1549: Action, please!

“Power Nelson, Futureman,” from Prize Comics #16 (1941) uses the Jack Kirby template of early comic book art. Action, action, action. The art is attributed to Paul Norris, a journeyman who drew for decades, comic books, pulps and comic strips.

 Copyright King Features, original art for a story illustration by Norris from 1947.

The breathless pace of the art covers up a lot of deficiencies in the story. Our eyes are so busy goggling the punches thrown (even by a girl) that we don’t have time to think that it is just WWII comic book silliness.

Norris, born in 1914, died in 2007.

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Number 717


A rocket to Uranus


The oddball-looking story with its primitive artwork and goofy-looking aliens is from Prize Comics #4, 1940. Power Nelson, called Future-Man ("Futureman" on the cover), is a scientifically produced superhuman in the advanced year of 1982. Another of those future-in-the-past stories I love.

Artwork in this episode is credited by the Grand Comics Database as being by Dick Sprang? The ? means they aren't sure. There are places where it looks to me like it could be very early Dick Sprang, and everyone has to start somewhere. Dick Sprang is my favorite Batman artist, Golden Age or otherwise.

When reading this story you're getting an allegory about the Great Depression.* During a time of economic upheaval Emperor Seng is quoting U.S. President Herbert Hoover: "Prosperity is just around the corner." (According to some sources Hoover never actually said that, but I digress.) You also get a science-fictional reference to a true life story from the 1930s, nearly forgotten today. In 1933 the Russians agreed to pay unemployed Ford workers to set up a manufacturing plant and assembly line for Russian Ford cars. Many Ford workers stayed behind after the plant was completed, but in just a few years all the Americans had been either shot or sent into the Soviet gulags to be worked to death.

So, crude as it is, the story is a history lesson.

My question is, with what currency did the Uranians pay the workers?















*The Great Depression of the 1930s, that is. Not the current Great Depression.

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