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Buck Rogers gaf Non Kodachrome J1
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| The story of Anthony
Rogers in Amazing Stories caught the attention of John F. Dille,
president of the National Newspaper Service syndicate, and he
arranged for the author, Philip Francis Nowlan, to turn it into a
comic strip for Dille's syndication company. The comic strip was
named "Buck Rogers", and this name stuck in all later reworkings of
the story. Dille assigned staff artist Dick Calkins to the project. Some have suggested that Dille coined the nickname "Buck" based on a 1920s cowboy character named Buck Jones. On January 7, 1929 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century A.D., the first science fiction comic strip, debuted. Coincidentally, this was also the date that the Tarzan comic strip began. On 30 March 1930 a Sunday strip joined the Buck Rogers daily. There was, as yet, no established convention for the same character having different adventures in the Sunday strip and the daily strip (many newspapers carried one but not the other) and so the Sunday strip at first followed the adventures of Buck's young friend Buddy Deering, Wilma Deering's younger brother, and his girlfriend Alura. It was some time before Buck made his first appearance in a Sunday strip. Other prominent characters in the Sunday strip included Dr. Huer, who punctuated his speech with the exclamation "Heh!," the villainous Killer Kane and his paramour Ardala, and Black Barney, who began as a space pirate but later became Buck's ally. Like many popular comic strips of the day, Buck Rogers was presented in Big Little Books, illustrated text adaptations of the daily strip stories, and in a collectible Buck Rogers Pop-Up Book. The strip ran continuously for 38 years, with the final installment being published on July 8, 1967. The comic strip was revived in 1979 by Gray Morrow and Jim Lawrence. The strip was retitled Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in 1980, and longtime comic book writer Cary Bates would sign on in 1981 until the strip's ending in 1983. |
