Skip to main content

Link to Smithsonian homepage

Smithsonian Music

Main menu

  • Calendar
  • Listen
  • Learn
    • Ask Smithsonian
    • Collections Spotlights
    • Music Stories
  • Watch
  • Blog

Camera-ready comic art drawing for Buck Rogers

Object Details

Description (Brief)
This pen-and-ink drawing produced for Buck Rogers shows Feather explaining to Captain Rogers how he used humor and essentially acted as a court jester to trick Modar and Futura into letting him into the palace to spy on the criminals.
Murphy Anderson (1926- ) began working as a comic book artist in 1944, drawing strips such as Suicide Smith and Star Pirate. In 1947 he took over the Buck Rogers newspaper strip after original artist Dick Calkins retired, but he left the strip two years later to return to comic books. Anderson returned to drawing Buck Rogers in 1958 but for less than a year.
Buck Rogers (1929-1967, 1979-1983) was an adventure strip inspired by a story entitled “Armageddon 2419 AD,” which appeared in a 1928 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. The strip debuted with a storyline similar to that of the magazine where the hero, a young man named Anthony Rogers, wakes up five hundred years in the future, after a gas-induced sleep, to an America being ruled by evil overlords. Rogers is then recruited by the resistance, and begins his work fighting aliens, robots, and other villains. The strip was canceled in 1967 but was restored in 1979, as a television series, a comic book version, a feature film, and a comic strip.
Location
Currently not on view
Data Source
National Museum of American History
graphic artist
Anderson, Murphy
publisher
John F. Dille Company
date made
1948-04-07
Credit Line
Joseph Gura, Jr. (through Carl Sandberg IV)
Physical Description
paper (overall material)
ink (overall color)
Measurements
overall: 14.5 cm x 43.2 cm; 5 23/32 in x 17 in
Object Name
drawing
Object Type
Drawings

Featured In

  • Comic Art
  • Comic Art:References
Comic art by Murphy Anderson, Buck Rogers, previously distributed by the National Newspaper Syndicate
There are restrictions for re-using this image. For more information, visit the Smithsonian's Terms of Use page .
International media Interoperability Framework
IIIF provides researchers rich metadata and media viewing options for comparison of works across cultural heritage collections. Visit the IIIF page to learn more.
View manifest View in Mirador Viewer

Link to Smithsonian homepage

  • About
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy
  • YouTube
  • Twitter
Back to Top