Strange Adventures #50
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeStrange Adventures #50 is a representative example of DC's premier science fiction anthology at the midpoint of its early run — a title that, under Julius Schwartz's editorship, served as a proving ground for former pulp SF luminaries reimagining the genre for comic-book readers. The issue's lead story, Otto Binder's 'The World Wrecker,' reflects Binder's career-long fascination with robots and nonviolent first-contact scenarios, a thematic strand he had developed in prose pulps before bringing it to four-color pages. Meanwhile, 'Earthman — Copyright 1954' demonstrates the title's willingness to engage in near-future extrapolation: its imagined Moon landing in 1969 came within days of the actual Apollo 11 mission date, a striking coincidence that collectors and historians have noted. As DC's first science fiction anthology, Strange Adventures gave the medium a template for idea-driven, scientifically literate short-story comics that would influence the Silver Age to follow.
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Strange Adventures launched in August–September 1950 as DC's first dedicated science fiction anthology title — originally planned under the working title 'Project: Science' — with Julius Schwartz, a former literary agent for SF pulp writers, serving as editor throughout the early decades of the run. Schwartz drew heavily on his pre-comics network, recruiting pulp veterans like Otto Binder, Gardner Fox, and Edmond Hamilton to write for the series, giving those writers a second creative life as the pulp magazine market contracted. By issue #50, the editorial formula was well established: multiple stand-alone short stories per issue, illustrated by a rotating stable of DC artists including Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, John Giunta, and Seymour Barry, with Whitney Ellsworth serving as executive editor above Schwartz.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Cover date: November 1954; on-sale date: September 27, 1954.
- Strange Adventures was DC's first science fiction anthology series, running 244 issues from 1950 to 1973.
- Issue #50 contains at least four stories: 'The World Wrecker' (8 pages), 'Puzzle Planet,' 'Earthman — Copyright 1954' (4 pages), and 'The Man Who Stopped the Clock' (6 pages).
- 'The World Wrecker' was written by Otto Binder — a pulp SF veteran best known for co-creating Mary Marvel and writing the Adam Link robot stories — and features a giant, indestructible robot of Saturnian origin that ultimately chooses communication over conflict.
- 'Earthman — Copyright 1954' projects a future in which the first manned Moon landing occurs on June 9, 1969 — a fictional prediction that missed the actual Apollo 11 Moon landing date by roughly six weeks.
- 'Puzzle Planet' engages with the then-current scientific debate over Martian canals, correctly suggesting (for 1954) that the canals were optical illusions rather than real features.
- Editorial team: Julius Schwartz (editor), Whitney Ellsworth (executive editor); cover artist: Murphy Anderson (per DC Database); interior artists include Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, John Giunta, and Seymour Barry.
- Buzzy Brown, the teen humor character created by George Storm and scripter Alvin Schwartz, first appeared in All Funny Comics #1 (1943) and headlined his own DC series from 1944 to 1958 (77 issues); he is described as a trumpet-playing, record-collecting teenager in the Archie Comics mold.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Strange Adventures #10 (1955), Superman Annual #1958 (1958), Detective Comics #372 (1968), Lynvingen #2/1969 (1969), All Star Adventure Comic #69 (1971), From Beyond the Unknown #16 (1972), Green Lantern #1 (1972), Fantomet #11/1997 (1997), Titanes Planetarios #32
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