Maybe because he was relatively obscure even during his heyday I’ve always had an interest in the comic strip Brick Bradford. Oh he got some media attention, like a 1947 serial, and some assorted merchandise, but in the hierarchy of science fiction comic strips Brick Bradford always ran a distant third behind Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. Or Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon if you preferred high concepts and gadgets over cool art and fabulous babes. Flash had other planets, Buck the future leaving Brick, who operated on present day earth, what little there was left; robots, subatomic worlds, dinosaurs, etc. He was basically science fiction’s omnibus boy until 1937 when the Time Top was introduced and the all of time and space was his to play around in.

The New Zealand comic book The Adventures of Brick Bradford #96 seems to be running then contemporary strips and it dated 1953, so it seems likely these strips were written and drawn by original artist Clarence Gray and not his better known replacement Paul Norris. It’s an exuberant (I really like the way Brick smiles at the reader in the first panel of these Sunday strips), well crafted strip that’s a bit better than it’s reputation would suggest.

And, quite by accident, I came across this cover to an issue of an Australian comic book that apparently reprinted the same sequence.