Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera: April 2025

A promotional comic from 1960 called Space Explorer. It was part of the comic series Boys’ and Girls’ March of Comics, #202. Art was by Ray Bailey, who coincidentally drew the "Tom Corbett" newspaper strip.

These promotional comics were distributer to retailers who would brand them with their name and give them away to customers to attract them to shop at that store (like stores that sell Jumping-Jacks shoes.)

Space Explorer is the story of a brave astronaut who survives trials and tribulations to make it to Phobos (of Mars) to discover via telescope new information about Martian canals. Spoiler alert: Mars has primitive plants but no intelligent life made the canals.

Space Explorer. (Promotional comic.) Art by Ray Bailey. Boys’ and Girls’ March of Comics, #202. Poughkeepsie, NY: Western Printing and Lithographing Co. (18 p.) 1960.

A nice treat today as Caroline goes to the Moon! This was a popular French fictional series but I had not been able to find the one about the Moon trip until recently. The illustrations are beautiful and full color. Well worth examining each one for its details.

Pierre Probst (1913-2007 ) introduced Caroline and her feisty animal friends to the French public in 1952, and added to the series for a decade. He created Caroline, based on his tomboyish daughter Simone. The illustrations are charming, full color, and with wonderful two-page spreads with great comic details. Caroline' is about seven years old, and has blonde hair with pigtails. She lives by herself among a band of friends - the dogs Bobby and Rusty, the cats Puff and Inky, the bear Bruno, a lion and a panther. Pierre Probst's greatest gift was for showing the human emotions on the faces of Caroline's animal friends, and his real daughter Simone can remember her father drawing from a mirror as he himself performed the grimaces and guffaws that he wanted to convey.

Enjoy the adventure. (Sorry that some of the spreads get edges cut off.)