Ed Farr had two problems, and the global one solved his personal one.
As a circus aerialist and member of the “Famous Farrs,” Ed was in danger of harming himself or family members because he was constantly distracted by fretting about his real ambition — to go to college and study science (Invasion via Radio Telescope!, Strange Adventures 151, April 1963, with art by Gil Kane and script by Gardner Fox).
And then, while out for a drive in his girlfriend’s convertible, the astounded Ed spots two huge aliens emerging from the dish of a radio telescope.
Looking like gigantic gray versions of Reddy Kilowatt (a cartoon character that had served as a corporate spokesman for electricity generation since 1926), the metallic invaders telepathically boast that they draw their sole sustenance from planetary magnetic lines. They don’t mind letting the world know that they intend to rob Earth of its mineral wealth and enslave humanity to do it.
Authorities even drop an atom bomb on them, to no avail.
“An interesting nuclear display, but a harmless one to us!’ remarks one of the aliens.
“Is this the best they can do?” gloats the other.
But Ed realizes that nothing can stop them — literally.
Knowing that some metals cannot withstand a vacuum, he reasons that the aliens would have manufactured space ships on their own planet unless something about their planet’s metals or their own bodily composition was unable to withstand space travel.
While the aliens ignore the mere humans, Ed and his scientist pals use a helicopter to drop an inflatable plastic dome over them. But the jar of landing tears the air pump loose from the plastic, and Ed’s the only one who can repair it, thanks to his aerialist skills.
Finally alarmed, the invaders are about to tear through the plastic when the “nothing” of vacuum kicks in.
“Poof!” They vanish.
As a reward, Ed gets a university science scholarship — and the Flying Farrs are proud of him for his spectacular save-the-world aerial stunt.
“Several of the stories in Strange Adventures were about daily life on contemporary Earth, which was transformed by some mysterious sSFevent,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “The setting of the tales was often domestic, showing a typical home of the era, or set in the heroes’ everyday job.”
“Meshing with DC’s celebration of affluent society was a fascination with the dawning space age and wide-eyed optimism for the world of tomorrow,” wrote Bradford W. Wright in his book Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. “DC did its part by hailing science as a progressive force in the service of humankind. Superheroes often overcame adversity not with their physical powers, but with their brains and applied science — albeit in scenarios of dubious plausibility.”
“Most of DC’s heroes in the sci-fi comics were mortal astronauts and scientists. In these stories, even common television engineers and gas company workers had the scientific ingenuity to defeat alien invasions.”
Radio telescopes were then just a quarter-century old, by the way. In 1932, amateur physicist Karl Jansky first detected radio waves from space using a Bell Telephone Laboratories antenna. Then, in 1937, Grote Reber built the first fully operational radio telescope in his backyard in Wheaton, IL.
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