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SPACE FAMILY

SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON

My favorite comic book when I was a youngster was SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON, published by Western Publications under its Gold Key imprint beginning in 1962. For many years the rumor persisted that this was created by Carl Barks of Disney fame , but this rumor is false. Western produced material for Dell's beautiful comics of the 40s and 50s, known in the collector trade as DELL FOUR COLOR. Most of these were movie or television tie ins, with many of them being Disney characters done by Barks. Barks claims that he once sent a memo up the line about the title SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON, but that is all.

The FOUR COLOR series produced over 1200 issues, but by the early 60s Dell wanted out of the comic book segment, and transferred the rights of their various properties to Western.

The Robinsons consisted of Mom & Dad and their teenage son and daughter , Tim and Tam. They lived on a very large space ship that had somehow become lost. The stories were fairly sophisticated for the media, dealing with science and nature. On the otherhand, they were simply blocked , that is, unsophisticated graphically . The artwork was precise, but not spectacular. It was the work of Dan Spiegle, a longtime artist for Western. The covers were always painted, probably in acrylic, by an artist I have yet to identify. These were common on Gold Key publications, and gave the line a very classy look, at least to a kid. Compared to other comic books of the era, the were elegant!

This was just what the mind of a seven year old who was finding that reading consisted of more than Spot, Dick and Jane craved. The stories of SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON were not garish, in fact looking at them today they seem rather serene. Often the Robinsons were merely witnesses to some larger galactic event. Every issue they met new aliens whom they befriended.There was very little violence in the tales. They were simple tales of a family surviving in a totally alien universe.

SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON, the Gold Key comic, was created by a former Disney sculptor named Del Connell who became an editor for Western in 1957. His original concept, as shown in the first issue, dated December 1962, was to tell the adventures of the first family in space. It was to be called SPACE STATION ONE and the plot did not call for the family to be "lost in space". After the name SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON was decided upon though, their future path was locked.

The Robinsons inhabited a large, H shaped space craft in the year 2001. The two tops of the H were greenhouses. The family had two pets, a parrot and a dog, and of course, they were a two car family. Their "spacemobiles" still look sleek today. Artist Dan Spiegle says they were designed after his Remington shaver. Thank God he didn't use a Norelco.

Gaylord Dubois wrote most of the stories for the comic's fifteen year run. Other titles in Gold Key's stable were these originals: MAGNUS ROBOT FIGHTER 4000 A.D., about a man on a crusade against dependance on machines; DR SOLAR MAN OF THE ATOM, about a nuclear hero; and MIGHTY SAMSON set in a post holocaust New York. These concepts were so far above the competition that they are still readable today. In 1963, the hot comics were Batman, Superman, and newcomers Spiderman and The Fantastic Four. Looking at contemporary issues of those titles is painful , although nostalgic.

At that time Gold Key comics had 32 pages with no advertising. The inside covers were even devoted to "fun facts" and the like. This followed the FOUR COLOR formula. The covers read "Now Only 12 cents" or "Still only 12 cents". This is rather strange, because most comics were still 10 cents, except for late issues of FOUR COLOR which were a whopping 15 cents. When Gold Key took over for Dell, they were priced , from the beginning, at 12 cents. They would not reach 15 cents until 1968. Within months the two giants of the industry, Marvel and DC, raised their prices to 12 cents, but their non-advertising content was always lower, at around 23 to 24 pages.

Gold Key comics were the best value , but they didn't have the appeal that the garish competition had, at least in this country. Many Western titles were translated to other languages though and sold well abroad.

Gold Key also had the licenses for many, if not most, television and movie properties. On these they usually used photo covers. If it was movie or TV related, they had the rights to it, it seems. The only exception I can think of is DC's "Heckle & Jeckle" series.

With that in mind, we come to Irwin Allen, who was producing a totally unrelated TV show called LOST IN SPACE in 1965. Western was already publishing a series of comics based on his VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA TV show, and , for Dell, had done his movie of the same title and his LOST WORLD. When it came time to do his LOST IN SPACE however, Western deferred, having established its own Robinson Family in space.

But to cash in on any success that LOST IN SPACE might have, Western decided to tag that title onto their original, so in late 1965 the series became SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON LOST IN SPACE.

After about 18 issues, in mid 1966, the Robinsons stumble unto a group of 12th Century Englishmen who were abducted by aliens. They've been frozen all this time, and the plot really stretches when it's discovered that the leader of the group is an ancestor of the Robinsons. The plots started to sink after this. (The ancestor was returned after a few months to his native home, via a convenient time warp and the rest of the crowd were left to homestead a new planet.) No sooner had this somewhat dubious storyline ended than another one began, a terrible cycle of stories which placed the Robinsons on ancient Mars and then Atlantis just prior to its sinking into the sea.

After a couple of years of this, DuBois settled down and began writing more solid (at least for the comic book genre) science fiction. The series would last for another 30 or so issues, spaced irregularly over the next decade. Gold Key's production values declined though, and soon their ad count was as high as all the rest. The physical size of the pages got smaller , as did the paper quality . Painted covers were still used, but they were not done nearly as well as the early ones.

In the early 70s the title changed again, making a full circle of sorts, to SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON LOST IN SPACE ON SPACE STATION ONE.

SPACE FAMILY ROBINSON

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