Even when I was 6 years old, in 1960, I was clear on the fact that Space Ranger was only the second-best spaceman in the DC universe.
Over in Mystery in Space, Adam Strange had the advantage of stories by Gardner Fox and art by Carmine Infantino (who could not only make you believe the unbelievable, but make you believe the unbelievable to be sleek, tempered, and elegant).
Space Ranger, the lead feature in Tales of the Unexpected, was delivered with the workmanlike art of Bob Brown and goofy-fun stories by Arnold Drake and Bob Haney.
DC’s two spaceman superheroes — one operating in the present, the other in the future — were actually created to be rival concepts and placed with rival editorial teams.
This house ad spotlights Tales of the Unexpected 55. In The Ghost Creatures of Phobos, Allied Solar Enterprises exec Rick Starr dons his Space Ranger disguise and, with his cute shape-shifting little pal Cryll, investigates reports of ghostly menaces on the Martian moon Phobos. The phantoms of monsters and Wellsian war machines turn out to be images reflected from the moon’s past for criminal purposes.
In Mystery in Space 63’s The Weapon That Swallowed Men, the green, cube-headed alien Vantorinvadese Rann with a weapon that turns people into gas.
“Carmine Infantino’s art is beautiful in this tale,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “An early scene shows ruins of Sumuru, the first city on Rann. The walls of the ruins are made up of numerous irregularly sized rectangular blocks… They form an imaginative and unusual variation on Infantino’s Art Deco architecture.”
And in House of Mystery 104’s The Seeing-Eye Man, a scientist’s “retriever ray” pulls an alien spaceship to a crash landing on Earth. He’s pressed into service leading the temporarily blinded, telepathic alien Zod, and cleverly thwarts the alien’s plan to conquer Earth.
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