Are you ready to blast off for adventure in the far future with your Christmas annual filled with off-brand cowboys and generic spacemen? Can your heart stomach the thrills and excitement of an astronaut hero that's kind of a bargain-bin cross between Dan Dare and the short-lived Kirby/Wood 'Sky Masters'? Sure it can. It's Christmas!
Yes, it's Space Ace, zooming thru the ionosphere tightly encased in EC-style detailed pressure suits, wondering what the "flap" is. I wonder what that is too, sometimes.
Turns out "the flap" is that Dr. Everhart has been travelling back in time, and then he vanished, so the Space Patrol is worried that he could tamper with the past with "disasterous" results. Obviously the solution is to send fleets of flying saucers to every era of Earth's history, thereby drastically increasing the chances of whatever it was they were trying to stop in the first place.
Also, time-travelling via 'discojet' sounds amazing. Crank up the Donna Summer, hand me some amyls, and let's get cracking!
Bill has left his "dinasaur" behind, which could be "disasterous"!
Spacemen of the future are really, really impressed by forests and swamps.
Needles, cigars, etc., many terms have been used to describe rockets and spaceships. This is the first one that makes me think "suppository".
Yakar, o Zapek! Meaning, get away from our space suppository, Earthlings!
Oh man they're space aliens who are going to blow up the Earth and replace it with their own planet, Zodak! Not really sure how that works, planets don't drop down like checkers in "Connect Four", but whatever guys.
And - get this - they're Martians! From Mars! And they totally don't care what Earth hate-speech slur you call them!
I don't have anything amusing to say about this panel, I just wanted to point out that for all its faults, this Space Ace story really delivers in terms of giant futuristic-looking spaceships. Of course, Frank Hampson's Dan Dare had raised the bar pretty high.
Glad to see Martian xenobiology is based on a rock-solid foundation of 'whatever our scientists find amusing'
See, this weird 'sack of potatoes' comment would make sense if this was in fact a Dan Dare strip and Dan's buddy Digby, who IS built like a sack of potatoes, was struggling to get his giant can through a narrow pipe. But this isn't Dan Dare, this is a comic starring three men distinguished only by haircuts and mustaches. So whatever, Space Ace.
Quick, into the millions-year-old Martian supply ship and figure out how to close the door, and I'll hit buttons at random hoping one of them is the 'return to Earth' button! How much can spaceship controls change in a few million years of time and a few million miles of distance, anyways?
Man, if it wasn't hard enough escaping the Martians, now we gotta blow up the Earth TOO?
Ace discourages pursuit by ejecting the ship's supply of Waterman fountain pens right at the Martians. Those things are expensive!
And it's complete destruction as the Martian ship - travelling at orbital speeds, making collisions of any kind catastrophic - slams into expensive stationery supplies and is destroyed utterly. That'll learn 'em!
It's a good thing we sent these Space Patrol Discojets into the past to prevent any past-changing... which they do by causing gigantic atomic explosions, which will not affect the future in any way. Say, have I always had these green tendrils growing out of my head?
And it turns out that all those "flying saucer" reports were just Martian-hunting Space Patrol Discojets the whole time! And the mental derangement, cattle mutilation and anal probing associated with those flying saucer reports? All Space Patrol Discojets. Somebody tell Space Marshal "Blast Off" Biggleswaid to CUT IT OUT ALREADY
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