Mystery in Space #22 Poster (1954) by Murphy Anderson Square Earth DC Comics

Description

Legend has it that Mystery in Space editor Julius Schwartz commissioned the cover art first, then challenged the comic’s writer to devise a storyline to match the cover image. If that was the case with this issue, then writer Otto Binder more than earned his paycheck. “The Square Earth” relates the tale of Jason Wright, a space explorer/degenerate gambler whose reckless wagering threatens to drive a wedge between himself and his fiance Zinda Lowell. In a last-ditch effort to save their relationship, Lowell asks a scientist friend to turn Earth and its moon into giant dice, seemingly slaughtering all the planet’s inhabitants, but so revolting Wright that he immediately forswears his gambling habit. In the end, the “square Earth” (techically a cube) is revealed to be an optical illusion, and the lesson is learned without the needless deaths of more than three hundred billion people. Future issues of Mystery in Space would expand on the “Earth in peril” theme, with covers depicting the planet engulfed in flames, sliced in half by a razor-thin disintegrator beam, shrunk to two feet in diameter, and crammed inside a “cosmic safe.” Mystery in Space is the name of two science fiction American comic book series published by DC Comics and a stand alone Vertigo anthology released in 2012. Together with Strange Adventures, Mystery In Space was one of DC Comics’ major science fiction anthology series. It won a number of awards, including the 1962 Alley Award for “Best Book-Length Story” and the 1963 Alley Award for “Comic Displaying Best Interior Color Work”. The title featured short science fiction stories and a number of continuing series, most written by many of the best-known comics and science fiction writers of the day, including John Broome, Gardner Fox, Jack Schiff, Otto Binder, and Edmond Hamilton. The artwork featured a considerable number of the 1950s and 1960s finest comics artists such as Carmine Infantino, Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane, Alex Toth, Bernard Sachs, Frank Frazetta and Virgil Finlay. Murphy Anderson (born July 9, 1926) is an American comic book artist, known as one of the premier inkers of his era, who has worked for companies such as DC Comics for over fifty years, starting in the 1930s-’40s Golden Age of Comic Books. He has worked on such characters as Hawkman, Batgirl, Zatanna and the Spectre, as well as on the Buck Rogers daily syndicated newspaper comic strip. Anderson also contributed for many years to PS, the preventive maintenance comics magazine of the U.S. Army. As an inker, Anderson also co-created what many fans consider to be early defining images of the modern-day Flash, Adam Strange (whose costume he designed), Atom, Superman and Batman. With his frequent collaborator, penciler Curt Swan, the pair’s artwork on Superman and Action Comics in the 1970s came to be called “Swanderson” by the fans. As of the mid-2000s, he oversees Murphy Anderson Visual Concepts, which provides color separations and lettering for comic books.