West, Space And Time II

Copied from Comics Appreciation:

I went out in haste, posting the previous post without having finished it.

Classics Illustrated adaptations also included Jules Verne's bizarrely- themed Off On A Comet. Google confirms that this comics imprint also adapted Verne's From The Earth To The Moon. I am not sure whether the sequel, Round The Moon, would have been adapted separately or in the same volume or not adapted.

In any case, recently rereading Poul Anderson's first man on the moon story, "The Light," I reflected that this story could be included in a themed anthology with stories like Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon" and with extracts from novels like Wells' The First Men In The Moon.

It then occurred to me first that Verne's characters do not land on the Moon and secondly that I have not read any of Verne's three interplanetary novels so I am now ordering them through the Public Library. Whether this will lead to any comparisons with Anderson remains to be seen.

Thus, the progressions from comics to prose fiction have been:

from Dan Dare to Anderson's Dominic Flandry;
from the comic strip The Time Machine to the prose The Time Machine to Anderson's The Time Patrol;
from the comic strip Off On A Comet to the three Verne interplanetary novels;
from "Riders of the Range" and TV Westerns to - nothing really, although I have read Shane a couple of times.

In terms of graphic adaptations, Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has a space race between Victorian Britain with Cavorite and France with a big gun and, later, various European colonies on the Moon.