Carl Sagan

World Contact Day: Another Audience With… The Hoaxmaster!

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« We all have a thirst for wonder. It’s a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I’m saying is, you don’t have to make stories up, you don’t have to exaggerate. There’s wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature’s a lot better at inventing wonders than we are. » ― Carl Sagan, Contact

Time to keep a promise — a promise to myself, but just as worthy of being kept. A couple of years ago, I posted the first half of a favourite comics feature of mine, ‘The Hoaxmaster’, which ran in most issues of Gold Key’s UFO Flying Saucers in the 1970s. At the time, I declared that I might get around to posting the second half of the set some World Contact Day, which is today.

The bracing brand of skepticism demonstrated here by the Hoaxmaster, much needed as it was then — smack in the middle of the UFO-Spiritualism-Occultism mania of its era — is yet more urgently needed these days, as the merry-go-round of surreal disinformation spins faster and faster, further out of control with each passing day, it would seem. You may have noticed.

From UFO Flying Saucers no. 9 (Jan. 1976, Gold Key); as with all the Hoaxmaster vignettes, script by Pat Fortunato and artwork by Frank Bolle.
From UFO Flying Saucers no. 10 (May 1976, Gold Key).
From UFO Flying Saucers no. 11 (Aug. 1976, Gold Key).
This was the issue in question, my introduction to the title; it bore this terrific — downright terrifying — painted cover by George Wilson.
From UFO Flying Saucers no. 12 (Nov. 1976, Gold Key). Adamski!
From UFO Flying Saucers no. 13 (Jan. 1977, Gold Key). Bolle was always a solid artist — which is certainly why he enjoyed such a long and busy career — but I can’t think of any, among the myriad of features he worked on, where he seemed to enjoy himself this much. His work always had a deadpan grace, but here, the wit deployed in the scripts allows him to reveal a seldom-seen facet of his talent.

-RG