I’ve read a lot of new sf authors stuff in the past week, but I haven’t got them here to cite.
One thing I read recently was The Green Planet by J. Hunter Holy, which is the pen name used by Joan Carol Holly (undoubtedly to overcome the prejudice against female authors). She wrote about a dozen books between 1959 and 1977, along with some ephemera like a Man from U.N.C.L.E. novel. She was only 50 when she died. She also ran writing groups and was treasurer of the SFWA for a while. She was never a big name in SF, and the only reason I picked up her book was because I had read a comic book adaptation of The Green Planet that was published by Charlton comics back in 1962. (It was reprinted once in the 1990s). I found out eventually that the comic had been based on a novel, and have wanted to read it.
https://www.mycomicshop.com/search?TID=347151
It really is unusual, in a lot of ways. Aside from Classics Illustrated and its imitators, most comic books didn’t do adaptations of books that hadn’t been made into movies, and especially not science fiction. There had been a couple of adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom novels, but that’s about it. Charlton comics would itself adapt Jungle Takes of Tarzan starting in 1964 9apparently in the mistaken belef that it was now public domain), which inspired the Gold Key adaptations of Tarzan a year later. And Marvel and DC would be adapting pulp fantasy and science fiction books and stories beginning around 1970. But in 1962 this was virtually unheard of.
Furthermore, J. Hunter Holly has never exactly been a household name. I could understand adapting Tarzan, who was well-known. And the works by Robert E. Howard and the science fiction authors that started getting their stories adapted in the 1970s were well-known through the many paperback editions of their works by large publishers. But Holly’s book had been published in paperback by Monarch Books, a second- or third-tier publisher (It had been published in hardcover by Avalon Books, but that was probably even more obscure). Looking through Charlton’s list of publications, I can find no other case of such an adaptation. Why they chose to adapt a relatively obscure book by a relatively obscure author I have no idea. Maybe they thought they could do so inexpensively, and this was a trial to see if they could make a regular practice of turning SF novels into comics. If so, it wasn’t a success, apparently. This was the only case.
The cover art was by Dick Giordano (who was an artist and editor with Charlton), who later went on to greater fame as an editor at DC comics and , through his Continuity company, with many other publishers. But the interiors were done by other Charlton regular artists. They seen to have adapted to spaceship from the one drawn by Ed Emshwiller for the cover of the Avalon hardcover.
Looking through the comic again after many years, and after having read the novel, it’s surprisingly faithful, although they’ve cut out some gore and deaths and streamlined the story. I find it unsatisfying as science fiction, with too many unanswered questions. Her aliens feel uncomfortably like American Indians, with echoes of stereotypes that played well in 1961, but not very well today.
