WOLVERTON'S THE BRAIN BATS OF VENUS

     Basil Wolverton (1909-1978) was an artist best known for his funny 'grotesque' humor comics. He did work for MAD MAGAZINE, PLOP COMICS and created Lena the world's ugliest woman for Al Capp's LIL ABNER comic strip. Wolverton won a contest Capp held to draw the world's ugliest woman for the comic strip.
     But aside from all the funny comic stuff Wolverton did he could also do pulp magazine style artwork for sci fi comic books. Oddly he drew monsters in his sci fi comic stories in the same style he used in his funny humor comics. But there was often nothing funny about these monsters and mutants.
      His best known comic story in this style was a story that appeared in the comic book WEIRD TALES OF THE FUTURE in 1953. The story was THE BRAIN BATS OF VENUS.
     In this story a space man crashes his spaceship on the planet Venus and his co pilot die in the crash.
     On Venus he encounter a group of flying parasite monsters that attache themselves to the creatures of Venus. One of the Brain Bats attache it self to the corpse of the dead spaceman and turn him into a zombie. The Brain Bats want to take the now repaired rocket ship back to Earth and turn more human beings into zombies.
     You can find issues of WEIRD TALES OF THE FUTURE at http://www.digitalcomicmuseum.com/ be sure to give them a donation they do a great job of posting great old public domain comic books.

A couple of panels from THE BRAIN BATS OF VENUS  by Basil Wolverton.
Printed in WEIRD TALES OF THE FUTURE (1953)