Spacemen, Vikings, Commies, & Dinosaurs!

Charlton Comics' Unusual Tales had a habit of mixing genres, like sci-fi, fantasy, and horror similar to Twilight Zone. Their title of Unusual Tales was their own Twilight Zone, and Issue 41 had one of the biggest mixings of these genres in a single 7-page story titled The Primitive Parallel which had an entire road map of speculative fiction borrowing elements from all over. Drawn by former Marvel artists Charles Nicholas and Vince Alascia, this planetary romance is basically the store brand diet soda version of a space opera. As this came out in 1963, we open up on rocket jockey Captain Mark Ellis as he buzzes by Earth which he believes is still in the middle of the Cold War. He then gets caught in a meteor shower and warped to an alien planet where he stops by for repairs. Ellis gets arrested by the less-than-Secret Police of a viking-like society who throw him in jail when they don't believe him about not being a spy, which immediately convinces him that the entire primitive government are just a bunch of filthy commies. The spaceman convinces his fellow cellmates to take him with them when they breakout later that night, and their guide is the comely maiden Teena wearing only a roadkill miniskirt. They make their escape on equine-like creatures called Pelladors, but a dinosaur acts as a temporary roadblock who gets easily shooed away after having some rocks thrown at it. Ellis finally makes it back to his ship and suddenly he and Teena are having a tearful goodbye right out of Casablanca where they apparently developed some deep romantic bond in between the panels that the reader wasn't made aware of. Ellis sets a course back to Earth promising to hook up with Teena later on while he takes the message of freedom back to his own kind on Earth, so we're made to believe that the Cold War truly came to a close because an astronaut got horny for some alien barbarian babe and not due to economic factors within the Soviet Union. Given this, the current tariff war might hopefully be resolved by Red Sonja.

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