Strange Adventures #79 Poster Attack of the Snowmen (1957) Gil Kane

Description

On and on the sinister snowman plodded across the earth, setting the stage for the self-destruction of mankind. So begins “Invaders from the Ice World,” the chilling cover story that kicks off the seventy-ninth issue of Strange Adventures, DC’s long-running science fiction and fantasy anthology series. Previous issues had featured alien invaders disguised as circus freaks, houseplants, giant parakeets and even the Empire State Building (in issue #72’s unforgettable “The Skyscraper That Came To Life”). Here the cold-blooded villains are a race of “energy beings from the planet Pluto” who plan to destroy all the plant life on Earth in order to jack up CO2 levels and usher in a new ice age. Their snowman disguises prove woefully ineffective at throwing Earth’s authorities off their trail- especially since they show up in the middle of summer. And while they prove impervious to all form of heat- including the dreaded “atomic cannon”- a quick-thinking scientist eventually hits upon the idea of turning the “utter cold of absolute zero” against them. “We’ve been using heat on them! Fighting cold with heat is normal! But whne the normal doesn’t work we must try the abnormal!”- Darwin Jones, head of the U.S. government’s “Department of Scientific Investigation,” in Strange Adventures #79. Strange Adventures was the title of several American comic books published by DC Comics, the first of which began in 1950. Two Iowan boys build snowmen during an unseasonal snowfall, only to discover their creations missing the next morning. During the night, the snowmen had been possessed by energy beings from the planet Pluto and were now wreaking havoc in preparation for full-scale invasion. Darwin Jones of the DSI soon arrives on the scene and after a number of unsuccessful attempts to destroy the snowmen with heat, realizes that their paradoxical weakness is extreme cold. Earth is saved! Gil Kane (April 6, 1926 – January 31, 2000), born Eli Katz, was a comic book artist whose career spanned the 1940s to 1990s and every major comics company and character. Kane co-created the modern-day versions of the superheroes Green Lantern and the Atom for DC Comics, and co-created Iron Fist with Roy Thomas for Marvel Comics. He was involved in such major storylines as that of The Amazing Spider-Man #96–98, which, at the behest of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, bucked the then-prevalent Comics Code Authority to depict drug abuse, and ultimately spurred an update of the Code. Kane additionally pioneered an early graphic novel prototype, His Name is…Savage, in 1968, and a seminal graphic novel, Blackmark, in 1971. In 1997, he was inducted into both the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame and the Harvey Award Jack Kirby Hall of Fame.