Space Museum (comics) - Publication History

Publication History

Space Museum first appeared in the story "The World of Doomed Spacemen" in Strange Adventures #104 (May 1959), written by creator Gardner Fox under the editorship of Julius Schwartz. The series of 8-page stories was published in rotation with two others, The Atomic Knights and Star Hawkins, and appeared in every third issue of Strange Adventures from #106 - 157 (July 1959 - October 1963), with one last story, "Space Museum of the Dead World," in issue #161 (February 1964) - a total of 20 stories. With the exception of the first tale, which was drawn by Mike Sekowsky and Bernard Sachs, all the other Space Museum stories were drawn by Carmine Infantino. Only the initial story featured on the cover of Strange Adventures.

The first three Space Museum stories were reprinted in the DC Comics science fiction reprint anthology, From Beyond the Unknown #23 -25 (July/August 1973 - November/December 1973), but the title was then cancelled. Eighteen years later writer Gerry Conway re-introduced the Space Museum concept in "The Secret that Time Forgot" in Justice League of America #206 (September 1982), and in 1984 writer Paul Kupperberg followed in The New Adventures of Superboy #50 (February 1984), this in a 30th century Legion of Superheroes framing sequence by Keith Giffen around a modern-day Superboy story by Kurt Schaffenberger. Two years later Dan Jurgens returned to the original 25th century Space Museum for the location of Booster Gold's origin story. With the exception of the retrospective origin story of the Museum, "The Startling Secret of The Space Museum" in Secret Origins #50 (August 1990) by editor Mark Waid and Gerard Jones (with Carmine Infantino again returning to the artwork), and two stories set in the Museum - "When Robots Attack" in Legionnaires #68 (Feb 1999) by Roger Stern and Tom McGraw, and Booster Gold #0 (April 2008) - the few other references since have all been in retellings of or allusions to Booster Gold's origin.