Odhanan wrote:Zotster wrote:Odhanan wrote:
That is really interesting. What is the book's title, who's the publisher, and what are the names listed on the cover, if you don't mind?
I have it here now. Its title is "The Adventures of Buck Rogers" and has lots of amusing little blurbs on the cover ("With over 150 pictures suitable for coloring," "The BIG BIG book," "New Stories New Pictures"). It has "Lt. Dick Calkins" written on the front cover....
Edit to add: I want to note that this is by no means a comic book. It's a 300+ page book that has a lot of full-page B&W illustrations but tons of txt too.
I'll be damned. So Lorraine Williams is a fucking liar from start to finish.
Well, on this case she was telling the truth. Dille was the big cheese in the National Newspaper Syndicate and he was the one who came up with the idea for the comic strip. He paired up an artist (Calkins) with a writer (Nowlan). Nowlan had originally written for Amazing Stories in (I think) the 1920s or 30s called "The Airlords of Han" This involved a future dystopian America that was a ruined wilderness ruled by Asians in flying ships where the 'rebel' Americans live is small, hidden settlements and are slowly rebuilding their technology to throw out the Asian rulers. Its sort of like "Terminator" but without time travel and substituting the Han for robots.
Dille arranged to have Nowlan rewrite his stories as a comic strip, changed the name of the main character to "Buck" and convinced Calkins that he wanted to draw "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" rather than the caveman and dinosaur strip that Calkins was eager to draw. Later, the caucasians defeat the Han and sign a treaty and they start travelling to places like Mars, Venus, etc. One of their big villains were the "Tigermen of Mars" who apparently made it into the 80s TV show as well. The Tigermen were like Klingons in behavior. I have a huge collection of reprints of the old strips.
There were apparently different lines of products that were released through different companies and various labyrynthian do not compete clauses ... so Nowlan and Calkins could release a book of original non-comic strip material (i.e.: coloring books or illustrated story books) through another publisher, but if they wanted to release a comic strip, it had to be through Dille's organization.
I don't know how Calkins and Nowlan felt about the deal, but to say that Dille "created" Buck Rogers as a comic strip and brought it to the public is probably as accurate a description as any. Nowlan wrote the short stories that Dille told him to 'recycle' into the first few years of the comic strip and Dille convinced Calkins to draw men and women with air ships and distintigrator pistols instead of dinosaurs and cro-magnons. Dille then got the strip into every newspaper he could and the popularity of the character took off.
If that's the one, no, it was just intended as a light-hearted romp. There was no insult meant.
ROFLMAO!