Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Rex Dexter of Mars, a Golden Age comic

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a neat comic from the late 1930s and early 1940s titled Rex Dexter of Mars. According to various online sources, Rex Dexter of Mars, a Flash Gordon-like character created by artist Dick Briefer, appeared in several issues
of Mystery Men Comics from 1939 to 1941, as a daily strip in early 1940, and as a one-shot comic book in the fall of 1940. Here’s a summary of the Rex Dexter story, provided by fan Igor Studenkov:

“Rex Dexter was the son of Montague Dexter, a scientist. When the 1939 World Fair came around, he used it as an opportunity to demonstrate his newest invention - an inter-planetary rocket ship. He and his wife boarded it and headed for Mars. But the ship broke down and crashed as soon as it reached its destination. It took Montague 60 years to repair the ship. By that time, he was too old to fly it, so he entrusted the task to his young Martian-born son, Rex. The first few issues touched on Rex's culture shock at discovering an Earth that was much more advanced then the world his father left behind (with Cynde serving as his guide/potential love interest), but before long, he became yet another space adventurer living on the futuristic Earth. Oh, and according to the early strips, in the year 2000, Europe is a wasteland devastated by a terrific war that took place in the 1950s.”

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