Chester Martin
Every installment of Futura was credited to John Douglas. The catch is, of course, that he didn't exist. John Douglas was a house name attached to the Futura brand so that readers thought there was consistency from one comic to the next.
Sadly, there's no evidence to lead us to the writer of Futura's terse, technobabble filled prose. However, by comparing art styles and following the clues we can say with some certainty that the artist of this Futura installment is Chester Martin.
Unfortunately, there's very little I can tell you about Chester Martin. I can only find his name attributed to a handful of covers, mostly for Planet Comics or the book's sister, pulp publication Planet Stories. More likely than not, Mr. Martin was an in-house artist for Fiction House, the publisher of Planet Comics and Planet Stories in 1946 at the very least. His work on Futura seemed to be the pen and ink style pulp and adventure comic artists were so fond of. Lots of shading. Lots of cross-hatching.
Outside of work for Fiction House I can only find one other piece of art by Chester Martin: the cover of Science Fiction Digest #1 published in 1954 by the Specific Fiction Corp.
It is possible Chester Martin isn't the artist's real name but the pen name he used while working at Fiction House. It is also possible Chester Martin was only in the pulp and comic field for a short time. For whatever reason, though, there's precious little information available and that's a shame. He's a pretty spectacular artist.
Notes:
To catch you up in case you're confused: Marcia Reynolds, a secretary from Titan City on Earth, has been abducted by aliens. We'll see later that the being that kidnapped her is a drone slave of the shorter, big headed aliens. A 4H-Dim ray (meaning 4th Dimension, I suppose) was used to make the drone slave invisible so it could abduct humans with no interference.Comments:
*Guest*
Guest post by "JD"
Well, obviously they need her for the experiments... for survival!
Survival of whom? Eh, what's the diff? It's cool to abduct scantily clad women as long as it's in the name of survival.
And scantily clad. That's important.
Submitted April 10, 2014 at 4:25PM
*Guest*
Guest post by "Adamas"
"Mars needs chicks?"
Submitted April 10, 2014 at 5:11PM
*Guest*
Guest post by "Michael L. Martin"
I hope you are still checking this site for these comments. If you go to www.pulpartists.com/Martin.html you will find more information about the artist Chester Martin. He was my father and he did more than just pulp fiction illustration but also graphic design and his own artwork consisting of oil and acrylic paintings and block printing.
Submitted January 4, 2017 at 7:04PM
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