Rocket Ship X
Entry updated 1 January 2024. Tagged: Comics, Publication.
US Comic (1951). Fox Feature Syndicate Inc. One issue. Three comic strips and a two page text story; there are also three short non-fiction pieces – an optimistic two page strip on "Our Atomic Future" (acknowledging that future might be some way away) and one-pagers on Halley's Comet and reading maps. Save for Pete Morisi in the map-reading piece, the artists are unknown; the involvement of Jack Abel and George Tuska is suspected.
The first story is "Out of this World": in post-war Germany, American lieutenant Jock Macready gets into a fight with a German civilian who draws "a death Weapon the likes of which has never been seen before" – it destroys the atomic pattern of the body cells – and also carries a piece of metal that is lighter than air. Both were invented by a Dr Helmut Stefan, a German Scientist who disappeared at the end of World War Two. Jock investigates, discovering a remote controlled Rocket ship that takes him to a colony on Mars (see Colonization of Other Worlds) where Dr Stefan is planning to take over the Earth. Jock is imprisoned, but freed by a young woman who has no time for the doctor's plans and; after avoiding Martian Shapeshifters the pair return to Earth. Jock knows Dr Stefan is infatuated with a nightclub singer – the cause of the initial fight – and waits for him to contact her: he is shot when he does so. Jock reflects that the Martian colony of "supermen" is doomed without the doctor to defend them from the deadly shapeshifters.
In "The Ivy Invasion" a plant that survived nuclear tests in the Pacific is planted near a US Zoo; it promptly grows to an immense size, the ivy's prehensile vines sucking the blood from the animals (making it a vegetable Vampire Monster), moving on to people as it spreads throughout the city via the sewers. Nothing seems to stop its spread until – more by accident than design – scientists discover calcium chloride ("plus some other chemicals") will do the job. The comic's third strip is "Robot Rebellion", where recently laid-off aeronautical engineer Tod Kramer accepts a job to test Professor Wilkins's Time Machine, accompanied by engineer Vivian Foote. Their first journey should be 85 years back in time (to an area with no record of buildings or trees that they could fatally materialize in) ... but they're accidentally sent 85 years into the future, on to a Spaceship. It lifts off for the Moon, to quell a Robot rebellion (they want independence). The expedition fails – so, as humanity has not agreed to their terms, the robots on Earth attack humanity: though captured (and presumably killed), Tod manages to send a warning back to the present (1950). Professor Wilkins's reaction is to consider the future as fixed: humanity is doomed.
Rocket Ship X was an entertaining, varied comic; it is to be regretted there were no further issues. It has no connection to the film Rocketship X-M (1950). [SP]
further reading
- Sci-Fi-Classics, Volume 1 (Hornsea, East Yorkshire: PS Publishing, 2020) [graph: collects five different comics, including Rocket Ship X: illus/various: hb/]
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