Strange Adventures: When Turtles Attack!

Thanks to The Mad Artist for the image scans of Strange Adventures 118

In their DC science fiction anthology title Strange Adventures, editor Julius Schwartz and his staff demonstrated an understanding of the dreamlike quality of the childhood mind.

As an example, let’s take issue 118, appearing on newsstands early in 1960 and cover-featuring the tale The Turtle Men from Space by writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky.

Boys in 1960 often had pet turtles in little plastic water dishes that sported a plastic palm tree, and even more frequently owned green plastic “army men” (sold in bulk for as little as a penny apiece in clear plastic bags during the decade, before the Vietnam war eroded their popularity).

Massage those interests a while in your subconscious, and you might come up with the idea that turtles are armored, and military tanks are armored, so…

In that issue, you also got the stories Threat of the Planet Wrecker and The Indestructible Menace and a full page ad for the first issue of a new comic called Green Lantern. A Spotlight on Science feature answered questions about whales and water pressure, how to test water for hardness and the phases of the moon. This was back before Americans began to regard verified, factual knowledge as a threat. You got your dime’s worth.