I’m hoping to identify a short comic from one of the 1950s science fiction anthology comics. I read it a few years ago:
Aliens that look like praying mantises wearing bubble helmets arrive on Earth. Soon after they walk out of the ship they find a piece of paper. It is an agricultural services flyer showing a person holding a display of pinned praying mantises (a notice that you shouldn’t do that because praying mantises eat agricultural pests). The aliens assume that these are mantis aliens killed by a gigantic human and flee, setting Earth off-limits for invasion. Only 2 or 3 pages. I remember saving one panel as an image: one of the aliens confronting a cow that is going “mooooo”.
I’m pretty familiar with all the EC stories and that doesn’t ring a bell. Same for the pre-Marvel Atlas anthologies.
There’s a 1985 comic called Walka o planetę, which means the battle for the planet in Polish, which sounds somewhat like this, although it’s not from the 1950s.
Okay! Just for the Hell of it I flipped through my reprints of Weird Science and found your story in issue 13. It’s called “Say Your Prayers” with art by Joe Orlando.
Best Panel:
Cow: “M-o-o-o-o-o-o”
Mantis alien: “SILENCE…STUPID ONE!”
And you can view pages here – catalog number 10772.
Excellent! Weird Science/Weird Fantasy is among many titles that I skimmed through on my Kindle and online searching for it, but if I looked through that particular issue I missed it. The art style is more serious than I remembered, so it was one of the series I ultimately dismissed because I thought the style didn’t match.
That’s the one I mentioned saving. I just saved it again.
(I wanted it to post to a Facebook group I recently discovered dedicated to no-context Atomic Age comic panels.)
That’s what threw me off at first. Your mention of bubble helmets had me mentally going through all the Wally Wood stories. Orlando was more of a horror guy than SF despite being a student of Wood.