PLANET PAYSON & PUNCH POWERS - Crisis of Ionite on Earth!

This one's gonna be a little weird...

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading through some of the comics that I've gotten off the Golden Age Comics Downloads site. I read this one story that for some reason I really kind of liked. Unfortunately, the issue was incomplete and the story was missing at least a couple pages off the end. So I just figured "Oh, well, whatever..."

Yesterday I was thinking about that story again. I had forgotten that it wasn't complete, just remembering that I wanted to use it on my blog. The problem was: I couldn't remember what comic it was in or even what the title of the feature was. I was stymied! How was I going to track it down!? For some reason, I did remember that the story had something to do with "ionite." So I just took a chance and Googled "ionite." After digging through the results, I found a hit on the Grand Comic Book Database. Success!! Or so I thought. The hit was for an issue of PLANET COMICS. While I do have the entire series, I knew that I hadn't been going through them (they're on a disk, not physically on my computer). But the line on GCBD: "Ionite, a new metal discovered on Mercury, is...;" was a 100% match with I remembered from the story!!

I set ComicRack to show recently read comics. And started going through them hoping to get lucky. And I found it!! Punch Powers from LUCKY "7" COMICS!! But what about that listing on GCBD for PLANET COMICS #7? So I pulled out the disk with my PLANET COMICS collection and started looking. I was kinda stunned when I found the Planet Payson story. It was the same story!!! Not a rewritten or redrawn story...the same story!! They changed the title, they changed the lead character's hair from blond to black. And re-lettered whenever the character's name appeared. It even gives a different person credit for creating the story. But it was the same story!

Really, I could've just run with the Planet Payson story, but it's been scanned from microfiche. I HATE microfiche. Mostly because 90% of the time, the scans from fiche are unreadable. And I don't like the look of the reproduction. Planet Payson wasn't so bad, but I had awesome scans for the first 4 pages of Punch Powers (and he has a cooler name)! The dilemma.

So, I'm going to start with the 4 Punch Powers pages and finish with the fiche-y Planet Payson pages. Hopefully it won't cause too much stress... I'm also including the first page from Planet Payson for comparsion.

Planet Payson from
PLANET COMICS #7 (July 1940)
Punch Powers from
LUCKY "7" COMICS #1 (1944)
story & art by ?

While really I could end the post here. There's just more insanity that I have to get off my chest!!! Here's the cover to LUCKY "7" COMICS #1:

The cover says "Read Pioneer! Sir Gallagher - Dick Royce and many other new features!" Based on his appearances in DAREDEVIL COMICS #2 (August 1941) and WITTY COMICS #2 (1945), the guy on the cover is definitely Pioneer. The thing is: Pioneer is nowhere to be found inside LUCKY "7" COMICS #1! Neither are Sir Gallagher or Dick Royce!
GCBD, for whatever reason, labels the cover feature of this issue as Punch Powers, although there's no resemblance between the two characters.
They may have taken their misinformation from Howard Keltner's Golden Age Comic Books Index 1935-1955 (an awesome index of super-hero appearances you really should download). He also states that the cover features Punch Powers.
The Official Overstreet Comics Book Price Guide 38th edition lists Pioneer, Sir Gallagher and Dick Royce (along with Punch Powers and Congo Raider, who do appear) as features in this issue.

It's so bizarre that just by trying to track down one story, I've uncovered so much information that probably nobody even cares about!! LOL!

All the comics mentioned in this post
are available for free from
Golden Age Comics Downloads!!