KaiYves is tracking the history of high-altitude balloons through a wide variety of sources. At her request, Robert has scanned relevant panels from “The X-Men” number 18 (March 1966) and posted them here for her inspection:
Patience, Please
This site is under reconstruction and will look strange for a while. We regret the inconvenience.
Exposure to Marvel Comics at an early age had a deleterious effect on my writing style! For years, I ended all my sentences with exclamation points and overused boldface letters for emphasis — and dashes for dramatic effect! But I got over it — mostly!
It probably affected my speech as well. I remember wanting to be an intellectual like the Beast and say things like, “Compose yourselves, colleagues! I begin to perceive how the Professor intends to extricate us from this most insalubrious predicament.” I’m afraid I may have tried talking like that for a while, at least until the cool kids started beating me up.
You shouldn’t be ashamed of that, Hank McCoy is awesome.
Oh, I’m not ashamed. The Beast was a great role model, and I can still talk like him if I want to. But I usually don’t.
So, KaiYves — what do you make of Jack Kirby’s balloon-and-gondola combo?
Sorry I didn’t respond sooner, I have a lot going on this week… I’d say it looks like it’s based on the early round Strato-Lab gondolas (for comparison: http://sortingoutscience . net/2009/11/23/scientific-tourist-100-strato-lab/ ), maybe with some Explorer I and II influence for the rigging.
Strato-Lab was 1956-1961, so 5-10 years earlier, reference photos from newspapers or National Geographic wouldn’t have been too hard for Kirby to find (he might have had some saved already in a reference file, being an established comics artist.)
I always find it fascinating to discover the references comics artists used– National Geographic had an article in 2002 showing panels from Carl Barks’ Donald Duck comics together with the photographs from their magazine that they were based on.
In the same browsing on (external comics site) where I heard of X-Men #18, I also saw a Batman comic from 1942 where Robin is trapped in what is very clearly William Beebe’s bathysphere, and there’s a space shuttle concept painting that I would swear was Dave Cockrum’s inspiration for the launch scene in the original Phoenix Saga… maybe I should do a “technology in comics” blog post when I’m on Spring Break next week…
X MEN WIN!