Number 2241: Captain Marvel abducted by aliens

Otto Binder wrote over 900 stories for Fawcett Publications featuring Captain Marvel and members of the Marvel Family. He began his long career with the Big Red Cheese in 1941, and “The Sky People” is an early entry in the saga. I can usually spot a story by Binder, especially for Fawcett, by his use of humor. Like most Otto Binder scripts, the story is light. It reads to me as a humorous alien abduction story.

It would be two or three decades before so-called “alien abductions” became part of the overall UFO/Flying Saucer story. Today on cable television and streaming video services there is an entire industry of UFO sightings and conspiracy theories about the government withholding “the truth about UFOs.” Outside of comic books Binder wrote extensively of UFOs, although he used the older term, flying saucers, for the unknown objects in the sky. His book, What We Really Know About Flying Saucers, was published in 1967 at the height of a UFO flap. But “The Sky People,” shown here, was published five years before the sightings by pilot Kenneth Arnold that kicked off the flying saucer mania in the late forties-early fifties. In the story, published in the year America joined World War II, aliens not only abduct everyday American citizens, but also Hitler!

Grand Comics Database has a guess that the artwork is by C.C. Beck. I am not sure, but believe it is more likely a product of C.C. Beck’s studio, drawn by diverse hands. It is from Captain Marvel Adventures #17 (1942).

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