The Face on Mars... in 1958

A few years back, someone noticed this comic book from 1958 with a story about "The Face on Mars." Obviously, that was a few decades before the infamous Viking photos.

Incidentally, the art is by Jack Kirby, who co-created many famous characters, such as the X-Men, the Incredible Hulk, and the Fantastic Four.

The title of the actual comic book is, Race for the Moon, published in September 1958.



If anyone is interested in reading the full comic book, I made a few links.

Digital comic books are most often in formats known as cbr or cbz, and are a collection of jpeg images in an archive format (similar to a rar or zip file), and viewed using comic book reader software. If you already knew all of that, here is the cbz file of the 36-page comic book:

Code:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=VC9QELE7

For those of you who have no earthly (or martian) idea as to what any of that means, I also made a handy pdf:

Code:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OENM0KU7

(Just copy and paste the links. I'm not a big fan of the forumotion site redirecting all links to an advert. Sometimes, those types of redirect adverts have malware. It's easier to just not bother with it.)

What's really interesting is that not only is the Face on Mars mentioned 20 years before the Viking photos, but the story itself is extremely similar to the 1997 film Contact with Jodie Foster.