Land of The Living Dead by Al Williamson and Roy Krenkel

Forbidden Worlds #5 (March-April, 1951), © American Comics Group.

The Grand Comic-Book Database lists this story as being penciled by Al Williamson and inked by Roy Krenkel, but I’ll bet that Roy drew most of the architecture in the backgrounds as well. This would have been one of the earliest published pieces for both artists.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

The All-Seeing Eye by Jack Kirby Explained By Modern Physics

"T-rays" will make X-rays obsolete!

THz or T-rays, are the most under-developed and under-used part of the electromagnetic spectrum. They lie between microwave radiation and infrared (heat) radiation and can penetrate through opaque dry materials. They are harmless and can be used to scan humans.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

By varying temperature and the magnetic field, scientists can tune the pulses and observe the behavior of the waves.

"The highlight of our results is observations of interference of magnetoplasmons. By tiny changes in the applied magnetic field or temperature, we can make plasma waves amplify or cancel each other. This makes the whole sample either completely opaque or transparent to the incident THz radiation."

"Using THz cameras, we could detect weapons or drugs concealed on a human body, or look inside envelopes and boxes," he says. There are many other applications for THz radiation, including material studies, chemistry, biology and medicine." link

Ref.: Interference-induced terahertz transparency in a semiconductor magneto-plasma. 2009. X. Wang, et al. Nature Physics.

Abstract: Maximum modulation of light transmission occurs when an opaque medium is suddenly made transparent. This phenomenon occurs in atomic and molecular gases through different mechanisms, whereas much room remains for further studies in solids. A plasma is an illustrative system showing opacity for low-frequency light, and light–plasma interaction theory provides a universal framework to describe diverse phenomena including radiation in space plasmas, diagnostics of laboratory plasmas and collective excitations in condensed matter. However, induced transparency in plasmas remains relatively unexplored. Here, we use coherent terahertz magneto-spectroscopy to reveal a thermally and magnetically induced transparency in a semiconductor plasma. A sudden appearance and disappearance of transmission through electron-doped InSb is observed over narrow temperature and magnetic field ranges, owing to coherent interference between left- and right-circularly polarized terahertz eigenmodes. Excellent agreement with theory reveals long-lived coherence of magneto-plasmons and demonstrates the importance of coherent interference in the terahertz regime.

Tales of the Unexpected #12 (April, 1957), © DC Comics
Art by Jack Kirby

Academy Award Winning Animators from Montreal (1982)

From June 18 – Sept. 5, 1982, The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts presented “The Art of Animated Films”. In conjunction with this the Montreal Calendar Magazine ran a feature on five Academy Award winning animators from Montreal. Here’s the article, followed by the five films discussed

CLICK TO ENLARGE



The Sand Castle (1977) Part 1


The Sand Castle (1977) Part 2


Special Delivery (1978)


Every Child (1979)


Crac (1981)

Tor by Joe Kubert

CLICK TO ENLARGE






Tor #2 (Epic Comics, 1993). Tor © Joe Kubert










Tor #1 (Epic Comics, 1993). Tor © Joe Kubert

These tales are from Kubert’s 1993 Tor series for Epic Comics.

You can pre-order Tor: A Prehistoric Odyssey, that collects the six issue mini-series from 2009 by clicking on the link.

The Spookman by Pat Boyette

Charlton Premiere V2, #1 (Sept. 1967). The Spookman by Pat Boyette & © Charlton Comics

Showing the influences of both Alex Toth and Steve Ditko by way of Milton Caniff, the late Pat Boyette continues to be an underappreciated artist, probably due to the fact that much of his work was published at Charlton.

According to the editorial in the first issue of Charlton Premiere, “The Spookman is Pat Boyette’s brain child and it too was mulled over and put aside until the advent of Charlton Premiere”. Despite a the poorly chosen name, The Spookman had an interesting shtick of time traveling to investigate what promised to be problems of the mystical variety – although his first story has him (or rather his assistant) indirectly responsible for the burning of Rome, all for the original desire to make a fast $10,000!

As far as I can tell this was The Spookman’s only appearance.


Click To Enlarge & Read











The Demon © DC Comics

It’s interesting to note the similarity between The Spookman’s alter ego, Aaron Piper, and that of Jack Kirby’s The Demon, Jason Blood, right down to the white streak through their hair, even though Kirby’s creation was published a full five years after Boyette’s story.

Life On Mars Indicated by High Levels of Methane

Planet Comics #33M (1944); © Fiction House. Art by Murphy Anderson

Scientists have ruled out the possibility that methane is delivered to Mars by meteorites, raising fresh hopes that the gas might be generated by life on the red planet

Methane has a short lifetime of just a few hundred years on Mars because it is constantly being depleted by a chemical reaction in the planet's atmosphere, caused by sunlight. Scientists analysing data from telescopic observations and unmanned space missions have discovered that methane on Mars is being constantly replenished by an unknown source and they are keen to uncover how the levels of methane are being topped up.

Researchers had thought that meteorites might be responsible for Martian methane levels because when the rocks enter the planet's atmosphere they are subjected to intense heat, causing a chemical reaction that releases methane and other gases into the atmosphere.

When quantities of gas released by the laboratory experiments were combined with published calculations of meteorite in-fall rates on Mars, the scientists calculated that only 10 kilograms of meteorite methane was produced each year, far below the 100 to 300 tonnes required to replenish methane levels in the Martian atmosphere.

This leaves only two plausible theories to explain the gas's presence, according to the researchers behind today's findings. Either there are microorganisms living in the Martian soil that are producing methane gas as a by-product of their metabolic processes, or methane is being produced as a by-product of reactions between volcanic rock and water. link

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Ref.: Investigating the contribution of methane produced by ablating micrometeorites to the atmosphere of Mars. 2009. Richard W. Court & Mark A. Sephton. Earth and Planetary Science Letters: 288: 382-385.

Life On Other Planets: Space Police by Murphy Anderson (1949)

Click To Enlarge


Planet Comics #58 (1949) © Fiction House