Number 1079


Goodbye to the future


We're winding up 2011 in fine fashion, with a couple of beautifully illustrated stories from Planet Comics. Artists Lily Renée and Murphy Anderson were two of the top artists at Fiction House.

I told more about Ms. Renée's work and personal story in Pappy's #1015.

The future presented in the 'forties is pretty much long gone, replaced by the actual future. I love to look back on that never-to-be future. There was really a lot of optimism in it, considering the most terrible weapon in the history of humanity had been unleashed just two years earlier. Some popular magazines of the day painted a glowing future full of leisure time and personal uses of technology, others a more dystopian view of what would be left of humanity, staggering across a nuclear landscape. (Or in the case of "The Lost World" series in Planet Comics, being under the heel of the alien oppressor, the Voltamen.) A lot has happened since this issue of Planet Comics appeared and then disappeared from long-ago newsstands.

Here's to the future that will be, and to the one that never was. Happy New Year.