Well, that was all well and good for us Baby Boomers...but then I find out that The Greatest Generation knew that Saturnians looked like this:
Steaming piles of turd? Really?Yes, really. Instead of this:
...it's now fairly conclusive that Saturnites are more like this:
Two questions...Saturn is "Beyond The Sun"? Sure, I guess, but so is Earth, by that definition. And who the heck names their sidekick "Icky"?!?!?! And I thought Chuck and Timmy got a raw deal...A couple more shots of Golden Age Saturnalians:
Now, some of you are saying, "Didn't we find out that the Stone Men of Saturn weren't really from Saturn, that they were from far away and merely using on of Saturn's moons as a base?" Fie on that. The first Thor story said they were from Saturn, and that's what imprinted my youthful memory, embedded firmly by Stan and Jack, future retcons be damned.Still, the is one possible way out of my dilemma. Let Xog, King of Saturn, tell us:
Leaving aside the quaint Golden Age Science idea that Saturn's rings are made of gas, the fact that Xog's minions are shapeshifters allows me to pretend that Thor's Stone Men were the same as Xog's uglies, just shape-shifted into stone form (and maybe they're stuck that way?!?).That's my theory, anyway, and I'm stubbornly sticking with it, despite all evidence to the contrary.
So thank you, Xog, you gross, dripping, steaming turd-thing from Saturn!!
Xog first appeared in Captain Midnight #64 (1948)
6 comments:
Re. "beyond the Sun":
Saturn takes much longer to orbit the Sun than Earth does, so seen from Earth, for roughly half of every (Earth) year Saturn is "beyond the Sun" in the sense that it is beyond the line that crosses Earth's orbital plane at a right angle to the line connecting Earth and the centre of the Sun. (Hope that's clear as mud).
Did I mention that the two lines mentioned in my previous post are straight and intersect (at a right angle) in the centre of the Sun? No? Shame on me!
If you prefer a more narrow definition of "beyond the Sun", on at least one day of every Earth year (which would be about 29 or 30 times every Saturn year, AFAIK) the straight line connecting Earth and Saturn passes through the Sun.
Yes, Mensh, but a) Captain Midnight had been making regular runs to Pluto by this point, and none of those stories were titled "Beyond the Sun," even though your theory would still apply there; b) earlier in this story, they're observing the surface of Saturn with a telescope from Earth, which means at the time the sun was not between Earth and Saturn; c)It's Golden Age Science, so don't overthink it...
Didn't the Stone Men of Saturn used to be orange? Have those pages been re-colored?
a) Obviously every time Captain Midnight travelled to Pluto that (former) planet was on the same side of the Sun as the Earth (hence no "Beyond the Sun" title for a story set on Pluto), and b) just as obviously they used a special Golden Age Science telescope (see c) that catches the light rays bending around the Sun (like they bend around the Invisible Woman). So there. :-)
Good question, Anon. The first place I ever read the story--Stan's Origins Of Marvel Comics--had them green on the cover but yellowish/orange in the story itself. If you read the story at Marvel Digital Comics, they're green inside and out.
I couldn't say which (if either) was the original coloring. Unless, of course, my dear readers were to chip in and buy me a copy of JIM #83...
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