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Sunday, December 12, 2010

Historias Fantasticas #170 - 1967

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Comics Weekend I love looking through foreign editions of DC comics, especially ones from the 1970s or earlier, when you were more likely to find weird (to American eyes, at least) filler material or custom-made ads for other comics.

Historias Fantasticas was an anthology that reprinted different DC books in each issue; it debuted in 1958 and ran for 380(!) issues. This particular book reprints Aquaman #24, featuring the story "Aquaman, Save Our Seas" by Bob Haney and Nick Cardy. Here are some pages from it:
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...there's something about the mechanical lettering that charms me. Kind of feels like some Aquaman pages were crossed with an old EC comic.

Unfortunately, this time around there weren't many ads for other DC books. In fact, there was just the one:
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I wonder how well Tomahawk sold overseas? Probably not that well, I would think.

Is it me, or are the colors in this book so much more vivid than in their American counterparts? Maybe the paper--which feels a little different than American newsprint of the time--was of a slightly better grade, resulting in really eye-popping colors. It makes these mid-60s Aquaman stories look like pieces of "pop art", which was all the rave at the time.

Fantasticas!

2 comments:

John said...

If memory serves, the phantom diver has the wonderfully wacky so-60s name of 'The Invisible Un-Thing'. What's he called in this spanish edition?

David J. Cutler said...

And the flame haired girl is Karla! This is one of my favorite kooky old stories, especially the end reveal that it was aliens trying to steal the ocean. Or was it OGRE? Whichever, I guess haha...