Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and seventy-fifth installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false.
As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends. Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week's legends.
NOTE: If my Twitter page hits 5,000 followers, I'll do a bonus edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed that week. Great deal, right? So go follow my Twitter page, Brian_Cronin!
COMIC LEGEND:
DC published an aborted Matt Mason licensed comic book as an adventure in one of their science fiction anthologies.
STATUS:
True
Matt Mason was a fascinating toy line by Mattel in the 1960s. Introduced in 1966, as the United States was pushing to go to the moon, kids went big for Major Matt Mason, who was an astronaut based in a lot of the reality of being an astronaut at the time...
However, over time, the character became more and more of a science fiction character...
Including aliens...
Well, according to a great bit at Dial B for Blog, "Robby Reed" was told by the great Mark Waid that DC had actually cut a deal with Mattel to do a licensed series, but it fell apart for whatever reason (perhaps those reasons could be the basis for a future Comic Book Legends Revealed!) and so DC had a complete Major Matt Mason comic book by Denny O'Neil and Murphy Anderson, two of their top creators of the early 1970s!
Rather than letting the story go to waste, DC then changed the name to Commander Glenn Merritt and released it split between two issues of DC's early 1970s science fiction anthology, From Beyond the Unknown #7-8!
The alien that "Glenn Meritt" meets in the second part of the story even sort of looks like the alien we saw before, called Scorpio (Quasar in the comic)...
We've covered other instances of licensed comic books being adapted into other series, but this is one of the more straightforward examples, as it is basically just a Matt Mason comic book story.
Thanks to Mark Waid and Robby Reed for the great information! If anyone has anything definitive about why the comic book deal fell apart, I'd love to know! I could feature it in the NEXT Comic Book Legends Revealed!
_______________________________________________________________________________
In the latest TV Legends Revealed - Was Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: Next Generation going to be revealed to be an alien!?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Feel free to suggest ideas for future legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com!