Hunt Bowman

I recently found this old Planet Comic, Lost World, reproduced on one of my favorite Blogs (Pappy’s Golden Age of Comics).  The hero bears the improbable name of ‘Hunt Bowman,’ and, by coincidence, he hunts with a bow.  Accompanied by his sexy girlfriend, Lyssa, and his comrade-in-arms, Bruce, they wander post-apocalypse Earth and try to help the savage wandering tribes of Earthlings throw off the oppressive shackles of the invaders from Volta.  It is worth noting that although Bruce looks like a Voltaman, he was originally a human whose brain was transplanted into a Voltaman body.

The Voltamen come from planet Volta and have wrinkled faces, no noses and wear Pikelhauben like World War 1 German soldiers.  The have an almost Yoda-like speech pattern where they say things like, “Surrender you must!” and “Prisoners kill we will!

Planet Comics was apparently published in the 1940s and 50s.  It kind of follows the ‘savage man in a post apocalyptic world’ thing that somewhat resembles the early Buck Rogers stuff from the 1930s with Hunt Bowman standing in for Buck and the Voltamen standing in for the Mongols, but the Bowman comic is constantly referencing the ruins of North America by having the characters hide in a ruined department store, go hunting in an overgrown Central Park in NYC, jury rig a futuristic electrical generator to fire up a subway train and use it to escape from tadpole men, etc. Great stuff!

EDIT: Amazon sells a “Lost World” archive.  Unfortunately, it is only via Kindle Edition.  The good thing, however, is that Amazon now offers a Kindle Reader for the PC with late model OS (no Mac yet, though, as far as I know)… so if you buy the Kindle you are not limited to the Kindle’s tiny screen.

EDIT #2: (This was originally in comments, but I moved it here): I bought the ‘Lost World’ anthology for Kindle earlier but haven’t had time to read it yet. I’m glad Amazon/Kindle made the PC application available; from reading other books I think images look terrible on the Kindle (though type shows up great and I like reading word and pdfs on the kindle more than on my laptop).
The Kindle Reader for PC isn’t very versatile (but it is free). I think it was really made for reading text docs rather than comic books; it won’t allow me to zoom in on a particular part of the page to see a drawing in more detail (although it will allow me to enlarge the document till the image fills the screen on my laptop from top to bottom). Maybe if I look at it on my desktop that has a larger screen than the laptop?
The pages are scanned from old comic books and there is some variation in quality due to the condition of the old comic books (I’ve only looked at the first several chapters). On the other hand, I got about 700 pages of “Lost World” for ~$6.00 US that are, as far as I know, not available elsewhere so it seems like a good deal to me.


3 Comments on “Hunt Bowman”

  1. drsamsara says:

    Has anyone looked at these Kindle comcis? Do they show up ok?

  2. limpey says:

    I bought the ‘Lost World’ anthology earlier but haven’t had time to read it yet. I’m glad Amazon/Kindle made the PC application available; from reading other books I think images look terrible on the Kindle (though type shows up great and I like reading word and pdfs on the kindle more than on my laptop).
    The Kindle Reader for PC isn’t very versatile (but it is free). I think it was really made for reading text docs rather than comic books; it won’t allow me to zoom in on a particular part of the page to see a drawing in more detail (although it will allow me to enlarge the document till the image fills the screen on my laptop from top to bottom). Maybe if I look at it on my desktop that has a larger screen than this laptop?
    The pages are scanned from old comic books and there is some variation in quality due to the condition of the old comic books (I’ve only looked at the first several chapters). On the other hand, I got about 700 pages of “Lost World” for ~$6.00 US that are, as far as I know, not available elsewhere so it seems like a good deal to me.

    • limpey says:

      Note: I read the first few chapters this AM while nursing my New Year’s hangover. One of the chapters is very hard to read but the rest (so far) look OK. I don’t know if the illegible chapter is the result of a crappy print job on the original comic or a bad scan or both.


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