The Shade (Richard Swift) should have been on there too. A glaring omission.
Space Cabby was a recurring character in Mystery in Space in the 50s, not infrequently being the cover story, before Adam Strange took over the cover for…a long while.
So is Space Cabby the joke entry?
No Snapper Carr??? screw this.
Back in the day, though, the Stranger hosted tales of mystery. And if memory serves, one of the last such Stranger tales involved a pack of kids demanding stories form some of the other “host” characters, and when they were unsatisfied with those, the Stranger manifested to give them one more tale.
Ah, here it is.
[‘The Daring and Different’]DC Special #4
September, 1969
I stand, both humbled and corrected, by your superior comic-fu, sensei.
My obsession with the Stranger has served me well.
No Badhnesians? Bah.
For comparison, here’s the Marvel top 50. It’s um… Significantly more quirky:
- Kraven the Hunter, Sergei Kravinoff
- Juggernaut, Cain Marko
- The Sub-Mariner, Prince Namor McKenzie
- Marvel Girl, Jean Grey
- Swarm, Fritz von Meyer
- Black Bolt, Blackagar Boltagon
- Loki Lauyefson
- Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze
- Professor X, Charles Xavier
- Quicksilver, Pietro Maximoff
- Kingpin, Wilson Fisk
- Doctor Octopus, Otto Octavius
- Green Goblin, Norman Osborn
- Red Skull, Johann Schmidt
- She-Hulk, Jennifer Walters
- Colossus, Piotr Nikolevitch Rasputin
- Shadowcat, Kitty Pryde
- Cyclops, Scott Summers
- Havok, Alex Summers
- Luke Cage
- Black Widow, Natasha Romanova
- Beast, Henry McCoy
- The Multiple Man, Jamie Madrox
- Silver Surfer, Norrin Radd
- Ultron
- Captain Britain, Brian Braddock
- Iron Man, Tony Stark
- The Punisher, Frank Castle
- Ego the Living Planet
- Nightcrawler, Kurt Wagner
- Annihilus, the Living Death that Walks
- Deadpool, Wade Wilson
- Captain America, Steve Rogers
- Fin Fang Foom
- Daredevil, Matt Murdock
- J Jonah Jameson
- Kang the Conqueror, Nathaniel Richards
- Beta Ray Bill
- Doctor Stephen Strange
- Wolverine, Logan
- MODOK, George Tarleton
- Nick Fury
- Emma Frost
- Black Panther, T’Challa
- The Hulk, Bruce Banner
- Thing, Ben Grimm
- Galactus, Devourer of Worlds
- Magneto, Magnus
- Spider-Man, Peter Parker
- Doctor Victor Von Doom
Pleased as I am to see Black Panther in the Top 10 (Kinda a dubiously defendable achievement: I mean, ahead of Captain America, J. Jonah Jameson AND Wolverine?) I’m astonished Storm didn’t make the list at all.
Swarm, Ghost Rider, Havok, Annihulus, MODOK, Captain Britain, Ego the Living Planet and Quicksilver shouldn’t be on the list.
Mister Fantastic, the smartest man in the Marvel Universe AND the DCU, isn’t listed? Come on. No love for Iron Fist? No love for Utau? Where’s the supporting cast? No Phil Sheldon, Ben Urich, Robbie Robertson, May Parker, Mary Jane Watson-Parker, J. Everett Ross or Jarvis? Goddamn, Willie Lumpkin should’ve been listed.
I will praise this list for having the balls to put Victor Von Doom at the top while simultaneously omitting Reed Richards and the Storm siblings.
No Gambit or Cable? I’m calling bullshit.
I know. It would be simply marvelous.
That Marvel list doesn’t make any sense. Spider-Man should be the top, and the next few slots should be the Hulk, Captain America, Wolverine, and Professor X, in some order. It’s crazy to put a supervillain ahead of his primary nemeses, much less in the #1 spot.
The list was voted on by fanboys, not the general public.
The general public wouldn’t care enough to vote.
Doctor Doom is certainly deserving of a top-ten berth. Spidey and The Thing, who I’d argue are the most prototypical of Marvel characters, are in the top five.
Of the top five, the only oddball I see is Galactus, who’s generally poorly developed as a character. About all he has going for him is the gravity of his first appearance on Earth.
#7 through 10 are just weird, though, to be that high on the list.
No Turner D. Century? utter crap.
Tengu:
Space Cabby was the cover story in Mystery in Space only once, issue # 24.
I’ll have to look through my copies again, figure out which ones I’m misremembering as him.
As I do so, I spot issue 28, which is, by far, my favourite of the series, as an aside. As a non-aside, I think I’ve figured out where my brain conflated it - in the 40-odd issues I have before I hit a streak of Adam Stranges (I’m missing about 2 dozen of the series), there’s 4 separate ships that look enough like Space Cabbie’s cab for them to blend in my mind given it’s been more than a year since I’ve read them. (Two of which are Galaxy Knights stories, oddly.) There are probably a handful on the later issues, too, but I stopped looking when I got to the mid-50s.
Tengu, no point in looking for Space Cabby once you’re in the 50s issues. His feature stopped running after issue # 47.
I’m quite impressed that you’ve amassed such a collection of vintage Mystery in Space.
I wasn’t looking for Space Cabbie, so much as cover images I could have conflated with him while the issues were sitting unread elsewhere - space ship design in DC’s sci-fi department was apparently fairly lazy. (FTR, finished my browse, and only saw one more…and Adam Strange was dominant in the image, so I doubt I was misremembering that one.)