I think the cover [of the Peanuts volume] looks great and is very much in the spirit of that era of strips. I'm not old enough to have followed PEANUTS from the beginning but I am old enough to have bought, or acquired, most if not all the reprint books up to the mid-sixties.


Sadly, most people seem to think of Peanuts in terms of Happiness Is A Warm Puppy/The Red Baron/It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and all that sentimental/cutesy cra...uh, stuff and either forget or are unaware of how sharp, satirical, and downright mean the strip once was. Easily a companion to Jules Pfeiffer's SICK. I regret the icky sweetness that crept in but I guess it's hard to be such a curmudgeon when you're making so much dough. (Walt Kelly and Al Capp being perhaps the opposite extreme, though I don't think they approached the marketing bonanza that Schulz experienced.)

The first I was aware of Adam Strange was in a house ad for a story called "The Fadeaway Doom," which is such a powerful title, it made me intensly curious and determined to find this comic, though to this day I don't think I ever read or even saw this issue (another similar experience was a Flash cover with the Trickster running along the telephone wires attacking the Flash with a pea-shooter weapon), though God knows I made it my business to become a regular reader as soon as I was able to track something down.

"Vengeance of the Dust Devil" was the first issue of MYSTERY IN SPACE I actually found and bought. It's kind of scary that such memories would be so strong and specific.

As for your not seeing the early issues, my personal feeling is that your local distribution was not as good as you thought. I remember going to several stationary stores to get everything I needed. I think in those days not everybody would carry the full line. I completely missed the first Atom SHOWCASE, basically because I literally NEVER saw it.

One also has to factor in one's age - those comics to me were more "adult" and I have the feeling that there were things I just never noticed simply because they were too "advanced" for my six or seven-year-old mentality. I know I was an avid reader of all the Superman/Batman titles and aware of, though not actively interested in, the various Harvey or Archie titles.

Then, one day, some friends of my parents and their daughter came for a visit. She was some years older than me and brought over issues of GREEN LANTERN, WONDER WOMAN, and AQUAMAN (in his SHOWCASE tryout). It was both a thrilling and, at the same time, very disturbing experience since I couldn't understand how they could exist and I didn't know about them. It was also kind of a shockeroo that here was a girl who read comics, but that's a whole other issue.

Getting back to Adam Strange...it's a pity that only the Adam Strange stories are reprinted. I remember the back-up stories from that time as also being good, a particular favorite being the Star Rovers series, though I also liked Atomic Knights and Space Museum in STRANGE ADVENTURES. And Star Hawkins too, wherever the heck that was.

Which now makes me think...how about a cover gallery of MY GREATEST ADVENTURE? Those were some fun cover concepts. I still remember the first one I ever bought with a guy who had a comet for a head.