I was just in my local comic book store, Zeno’s Books in Cheseapeake, VA, on Tuesday which is always the new comic delivery day from Diamond Distributors. The owner, Wayne Ehrmann, had called me to let me know I had a hardcover book come in Comic Book Chronicles 1960 -1964. Not long before I got there a guy had come in with two boxes of old comic books that he sold to Wayne. There wasn’t much there of interest except for one high grade issue of a DC mystery / science fiction comic from 1962, House Of Mystery #129. 

I’ve always loved comics with science fiction anthology stories like the 1950s EC comics Weird Science and Weird Fantasy and of course the pre-Marvel titles like Strange Tales, Journey Into Mystery and so on. I have been collecting those titles since the 1960s. Because I was never much of a DC fan I had never been into collecting the sci-fi anthology comics from DC like Strange Adventures, Mystery In Space, Tales of The Unexpected, House of Secrets, and House of Mystery. I knew they had good art by Carmine Infantino and Murphy Anderson and the writers did know about science fiction since most of them had been sci-fi pulp magazine writers from the 1930s and 1940s: men like Edmond Hamilton, Gardner Fox, John Broome, Otto Binder, Mort Weisinger. I did buy new in Sacramento, CA in 1980 at the Comics and Comix comic book store a DC paperback reprint book Mysteries In Space but had never read it.

My Air Force roommate Cliff Golsarry in Sacramento circa 1979 had read my EC hardcover reprints and liked them and so he tried this DC book. He quickly gave it back it to me. He said the stories were stupid and not even close to the quality of the EC sci-fi stories. I knew what he meant because I had read DC Superman comics in the early 1960s and they did have a goofy, adolescent quality that a I liked myself as a comic collector but that normal people like Cliff wouldn’t appreciate. In 1999 DC put out another paperback sci-fi collection in color Mystery In Space which I bought but also never read. So over all these years I left my curiosity about what was in these DC sci-fi comics on the back burner.

 Then in 2012 DC put out a large paperback black & white reprint collection of Strange Adventures and Tales of the Unexpected. I don’t like paperback books or b&w reprints but I figured if I was finally going to finally start reading these stories this was the only way to do it. DC doesn’t figure there is a market for them in quality hardcover color reprints and I don’t want to spend the money on the original comics. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the stories. The art is consistently professional and the writing was pretty good. Many of the plots are far fetched and silly like Cliff said but I knew that going in. However some of the plots were more adult and many of the stories touched on some aspect of scientific principles in more detail than the EC and pre-Marvels do. I still prefer the EC and pre-Marvel stories but the DC sci-fi stories are different and they do start to grow on you after awhile. I also just obtained reading copies from ebay of those older color reprint books I still have stashed away Mysteries In Space and Mystery In Space which I’m reading right now. 

Strange Adventures and Tales of the Unexpected both Volume 1 from 2012. DC has a long rich history of science fiction stories from the 1950s and 1960s and I will buy all of these volumes they put out. I hope someday DC or another company under license will republish them in hardcover and color like these stories deserve.