A comic book based on a property from another medium always comes with some crossover audience appeal: novel adaptations attract fiction fans, movie adaptations draw film fans, and packagings of newspaper comic reprints interest fans of those strips. This practice was put to extensive use in the Atom Age (1945-1954), when comic books were still designed for the entire population—girls, boys, women, and men—and could achieve real results by such broad-based marketing. Also, these kinds of comics were often produced with a single story running from cover to cover and supplemental material on the inside and back covers. This is one of the best comic book formats.

     A great movie adaptation need not start with a great movie. Leonard Maltin's film almanac describes 1951's "Mask of the Avenger" as "not up to snuff." But the version released as Fawcett's Motion Picture Comics #108 (January 1952) is excellent. The story—told against the background of an 1848 war between Italy and Austria—is a solid costume-hero epic of a determined young man who fights political treachery by disguising himself as the "ghost" of the legendary local hero, Monte Cristo. The military governor has sold out to the Austrians and taken over a key coast fort that guards the harbor. The only hope is for the masked avenger to rally the townspeople to storm the fort before the Austrian ships arrive.

     It's familiar enough, and the art—although engaging—is not superb, but the whole package hangs together so well that the result is a totally satisfying comic book. The tale unfolds with perfect pacing and clear characters and takes a dramatic situation to an exciting climax. Done right and drawn well—as is the case here—is enough. Fawcett published two successful movie titles, but they were working their way out of the comics business to concentrate on Gold Medal, their even more lucrative line of paperback books.

     One of the finest newspaper strips was Alex Raymond's Rip Kirby. Raymond had won fame as the king of high romantic fantasy with Flash Gordon, and in the post-War years he reinvented his style with a detective strip that combined detailed and realistic plots with detailed and realistic settings. In 1952 Harvey published a wonderful one-shot in their Harvey Comics Hits series (#57 July), "Rip Kirby Exposes the Kidnap Racket." The strip adventure is perfectly transformed into a 32-page comic book novel.

     A childless woman with a wealthy husband buys a baby on the black market. But the child's real mother is devastated when she finds that the home where she left her son has been abandoned with no forwarding address. Fortunately, she happens to be a friend of a friend of Rip Kirby, and after telling her story to Madelon—the film star who was once fellow chorus girl Pagan Lee—the actress takes her to Rip and insists he take her case.

     Thus begins a splendidly-crafted tale, with a cast of believably-motivated characters, rendered in a style that merges the harsh and the lush into a glorious spectrum. Even the wealthy barren woman is portrayed with sympathy; she has acted not wisely but understandably, and Kirby comes to realize this and contrives a humane solution to everyone's problems. The compelling and convincing narrative is fleshed out into a world of incredible richness and texture. Raymond's figure drawing still celebrates the human form with an even greater variety and a matchless gift for revealing personality though image.

     Flank the story with a handsome cast of characters in cameo portraits on the inside front cover and a bio/feature on Raymond and Kirby on the inside back, including a self-portrait of the artist, throw in a marvelous pin-up of Rip—gundrawn—protecting his fabulous fiancee Honey Dorian from an offstage menace, on the back cover, and you end up with a terrific comic book.

     Fast Fiction #3 (Aug 1949) adapted H. Rider Haggard's 19th-century fantastic romance novel, She. This is the story of a mysterious mountain kingdom hidden in the wilds of Africa, and its beautiful immortal queen who mystically summons a young Englishman, the descendant of her ancient lover. This translation captures all of Haggard's sense of wonder, and the art by Vincent Napoli is vivid and sensual. His Ayesha is a gorgeous combination of a black waterfall of hair, translucent skin and shapely form that glows from within. But the lovely queen is also a murderess and worse, and the Englishman cannot accept her.

     The book builds to an opulent, tragic, supernatural finale, with Napoli's art peaking in the scene where the queen bathes naked in the fire that is the secret force which has allowed her to live for centuries.

     This comic has 16 more pages than the previous two books, having come out before the thinner size took over, but the novel takes up 46 of the 48 pages, and the fillers are relevant, including a half page bio of Haggard. The front and back covers are by the "man of 1000 adaptations," Henry C. Kiefer, and they are as sumptuous as Napoli's interior illustrations. Fast Fiction, published by Seaboard, morphed into Stories By Famous Authors Illustrated, which was eventually bought out by Gilberton, whose Classics Illustrated was threatened by the competition.

     The "adaptation genre" produced a wealth of memorable and diverse comic books, especially during the Atom Age—the prime of the form when sales climbed to a billion a year, and the three examples discussed here show both how good four-color transformations could get and that graphic novels thrived in that august era.

Pat Calhoun has been collecting, researching and appreciating comic books since the early 1960s, and is a nationally recognized comic book historian. Pat resides in Santa Rosa, California.