Dynamite and Buck Rogers in the 21st Century

Mike Gold

ComicMix's award-winning and spectacularly shy editor-in-chief Mike Gold also performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com (search: Hit Oldies) every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information.

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10 Responses

  1. MARK WHEATLEY says:

    I think my favorite art on the strip was the Tuska run and then the Gray Morrow run. BTW – Gray did a BUCK ROGERS story for HEAVY METAL and it is included in the book about Gray – GRAY MORROW VISIONARY. And I would love to see the Tuska BUCK ROGERS collected into a book.

  2. Andrew Pepoy says:

    My favorite of the old Buck Rogers artists is Rick Yager. He was the first real cartoonist I ever met. Growing up in a small town in Michigan, I was lucky enough to have a library with lots of books on comics or reprinting them. The librarians noticed this 10-year-old kid checking out every book on comics and sitting there reading the ones that were reference-only, so they asked if I wanted to meet a real cartoonist and they arranged it. Rick lived in a nearby town. I still have the drawing of Buck he did for me on my blue-lined paper that day. He put up with a number of phone calls from a pesky kid with lots of questions in the following years. Probably got my work-ethic from him, more than any stylistic influences. So, he's my favorite. He did more work on the strip than any other artist, but for varrious reasons has been the least-reprinted of all. Sure would like to see that change.

  3. Larry Shell says:

    Interesting bit on the secret origins of Mike Gold. I hope Dynamite will do some, perhaps a comprehensive collection of the Buck Rogers newspaper strips. The early Calkins stuff is just great and I'd love to see a collection (or two if there's enough material) of all the Murphy Anderson strips. I'm sure Murphy would as well! Buck was on my short list of comic strip reprint series I'd like to see!

  4. Brian Alvey says:

    I love Mike's stories behind the stories.Sadly, I actually remember bits and pieces of the Gil Gerard 70s television series and the action figures I had more than any books or comic strips.There was an episode where Buck told one of these people from the future "there's something wrong with your Funk and Wagnalls" and I asked my mom if he had just cursed on television. I was 9 or 10. ;-)

  5. R. Maheras says:

    I read that Ace edition of "Armageddon 2419 A.D." around 1970 and I just loved it. During that same period, I was voraciously reading at an alarming rate similar paperbacks by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Andre Norton, and John Norton — sometimes staying up school nights into the wee hours of the morning because I just couldn't put them down.That said, when the Buck Rogers TV show aired about 10 years later, I was positively mortified with its campy interpretation of Nowlan's material. It was nearly as embarrassing to me as was the big-screen version of Doc Savage a few years earlier, where I found myself instinctively shrinking lower and lower in my theater seat, hoping no one in the audience knew I was a Doc Savage fan.

    • Larry Shell says:

      In my high school days, i.e. the 70s, I too devoured every pulp-like fiction paperback I could get my hands on that was in or out of print, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Doc Savage, The Spider, Armageddon 2419 A.D., Phillip Wylie's Gladiator, H.P. Lovecraft, John Jakes and more than my aged brain can remember. I must have gone through one every 1-2 days just in study hall alone! Now if I get through the daily paper, its a miracle! Too much time reading online to want to do it in my down time I guess!

  6. R. Maheras says:

    I meant "John Norman," of course…

    • MARK WHEATLEY says:

      Then you mean Jack Lang – John Norman was his pen name.

      • R. Maheras says:

        No kidding? Didn't have a clue.But what strikes me as funny about that fact is "Jack Lang" sounds like a pen name in its own right!In that regards, Lang was obviously not looking for a more punchy popular culture name, ala Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad), Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. (John Denver), or Benjamin Kubelsky (Jack Benny).

        • MARK WHEATLEY says:

          Yeah – First – I got it wrong – it is John Lange – and another Jack Lange was writing mystery novels when "Norman" started his GOR novels. So he just needed a different name.