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Captain Venture was the short companion feature that appeared in the back of each issue of Space Family Robinson. It was added with the sixth issue of the original run of the comic series, and continued until cancellation. The strip was a serial with 5-page installments, with scripts by SFR editor Del Connell and art by Dan Spiegle.
The story concerned the adventures of a pair of astronaut castaways, Captain Rex Venture and his engineer Scotty MacKay, who've crashed their spaceship on a planet on the edge of known space. While it was never explicitly stated, Rex and Scotty appeared to be contemporaries of the Robinson family, and could even be among the space crews that Space Station One originally served before her untimely loss in uncharted space.
Rex and Scotty find that the planet they're stranded on is called Plantis by the natives, and communicating with them is slow going because they don't have the handy translator technology that the Robinsons picked up early in their travels. Their efforts to repair their ship and take off again are constantly hampered by the fact that Plantis is mostly covered with ocean. Encounters with alien creatures and various races of sentient beings, hostile and otherwise, also complicate the castaways' lives. The most advanced of these the Terrans label the "Troglodytes," because their civilization lived mostly underground and dominated the marine environment with their patrolling submarines.
The Captain Venture feature ran for 31 installments, with the story ending abruptly when the original run of SFR concluded with #36, October 1969. As with the Robinsons still being lost in space, Rex and Scotty are probably still marooned on Plantis ...
Two reprint collections of Captain Venture stories, reworked into
book-length stories appeared under the title Captain Venture and the Land Beneath the Sea. Gold Key published the first of these in October of 1968, following up with a second issue in October of the following year, the same month SFR concluded its initial run.
This page last modified December 7, 2002.
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