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Jet Scott

by Robert Greenberger

In the early 1950s, science fiction was all the rage. space age technology was the next big thing and the movies were full of aliens, flying saucers, and other worlds. Flash Gordon and buck Rogers continued to ply the space lanes but the Tribune Syndicate thought the galaxy large enough for one a lot more feature. They reached out to budding screenwriter Sheldon Stark, who was already ghost writing Inspector Wade for them, to co-create the strip to be called Jet Scott. For the art, they relied on a veteran of the comic books, Jerry Robinson. “We carved out a particular niche, which was science fiction but just what’s in the immediate future. That was an area that hadn’t been explored before. We didn’t have people flying around in spacesuits. The hero of the strip, Jet Scott, was the head of the office of the Scientifact, a government agency,” Robinson recalled in Arie Kaplan’s Masters of the Comic book universe Revealed!

Dark horse is now collecting the complete two year run (September 28, 1953-September 25, 1955) of this forgotten SF strip in a hardcover coming in February. With America on the cusp of space exploration, this strip attempted to predict how we’d get there and what we’d find once we got past Earth’s atmosphere. When a mystery arose, Jet Scott would swing into action with investigations studying deadly Banthrax germs, and attempting to find the source of odd ocean creatures.

Every day, visitors would follow Scott as he conducted investigations that also showed the country’s concerns over foreign spies and worse, double agents, ready to sell out their country for money.

Stark clearly wasn’t comfortable writing science fiction-tinged tales so the “out there” drama was toned down in favor of conventional storytelling. The art was in a style one associates a lot more with Mary worth and judge Parker than the standard Robinson style. As a result, for an SF-themed series, it looked incredibly mundane. Robinson, though, worked hard to predict the future, doing all the research himself. As a result, he declared not to have taken a day off during the two years he worked on the feature. While the Tribune Syndicate pushed the feature to a high of about 75 papers, it clearly wasn’t poised to be a hit so when it was time to renew his contract, Robinson opted out which spelled a doom that not even Jet Scott could avoid.

While all of us know Robinson for his work with Bob Kane on Batman and his solo comic efforts, it’s his comic strip work which is often overlooked so having this book will be a treat for collectors. Meantime, Stark (1909-1997) ended up being a film and television writer whose credit histories include material familiar to comic fans including The Plastic man Comedy/Adventure Hour, Mission: Impossible, Land of the Giants, The man from UNCLE, The green Hornet, and even one two-parter for Batman.

Purchase

Jet Scott HC